{"id": "51150_1", "pid": "51150_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nVenus Is a Man's World\n \n \n BY WILLIAM TENN\n \n Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Actually, there wouldn't be too much difference if women took over the Earth altogether. But not for some men and most boys!\n \n \n \n I've always said that even if Sis is seven years older than me\u2014and a girl besides\u2014she don't always know what's best. Put me on a spaceship jam-packed with three hundred females just aching to get themselves husbands in the one place they're still to be had\u2014the planet Venus\u2014and you know I'll be in trouble.\n \n Bad trouble. With the law, which is the worst a boy can get into.\n \n Twenty minutes after we lifted from the Sahara Spaceport, I wriggled out of my acceleration hammock and started for the door of our cabin.\n \n \"Now you be careful, Ferdinand,\" Sis called after me as she opened a book called Family Problems of the Frontier Woman . \"Remember you're a nice boy. Don't make me ashamed of you.\"\n \n I tore down the corridor. Most of the cabins had purple lights on in front of the doors, showing that the girls were still inside their hammocks. That meant only the ship's crew was up and about. Ship's crews are men; women are too busy with important things like government to run ships. I felt free all over\u2014and happy. Now was my chance to really see the Eleanor Roosevelt !\n \n \n\n \n It was hard to believe I was traveling in space at last. Ahead and behind me, all the way up to where the companionway curved in out of sight, there was nothing but smooth black wall and smooth white doors\u2014on and on and on. Gee , I thought excitedly, this is one big ship !\n \n Of course, every once in a while I would run across a big scene of stars in the void set in the wall; but they were only pictures. Nothing that gave the feel of great empty space like I'd read about in The Boy Rocketeers , no portholes, no visiplates, nothing.\n \n So when I came to the crossway, I stopped for a second, then turned left. To the right, see, there was Deck Four, then Deck Three, leading inward past the engine fo'c'sle to the main jets and the grav helix going purr-purr-purrty-purr in the comforting way big machinery has when it's happy and oiled. But to the left, the crossway led all the way to the outside level which ran just under the hull. There were portholes on the hull.\n \n I'd studied all that out in our cabin, long before we'd lifted, on the transparent model of the ship hanging like a big cigar from the ceiling. Sis had studied it too, but she was looking for places like the dining salon and the library and Lifeboat 68 where we should go in case of emergency. I looked for the important things.\n \n As I trotted along the crossway, I sort of wished that Sis hadn't decided to go after a husband on a luxury liner. On a cargo ship, now, I'd be climbing from deck to deck on a ladder instead of having gravity underfoot all the time just like I was home on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But women always know what's right, and a boy can only make faces and do what they say, same as the men have to do.\n \n Still, it was pretty exciting to press my nose against the slots in the wall and see the sliding panels that could come charging out and block the crossway into an airtight fit in case a meteor or something smashed into the ship. And all along there were glass cases with spacesuits standing in them, like those knights they used to have back in the Middle Ages.\n \n \"In the event of disaster affecting the oxygen content of companionway,\" they had the words etched into the glass, \"break glass with hammer upon wall, remove spacesuit and proceed to don it in the following fashion.\"\n \n I read the \"following fashion\" until I knew it by heart. Boy , I said to myself, I hope we have that kind of disaster. I'd sure like to get into one of those! Bet it would be more fun than those diving suits back in Undersea!\n \n \n And all the time I was alone. That was the best part.\n \n \n\n \n Then I passed Deck Twelve and there was a big sign. \"Notice! Passengers not permitted past this point!\" A big sign in red.\n \n I peeked around the corner. I knew it\u2014the next deck was the hull. I could see the portholes. Every twelve feet, they were, filled with the velvet of space and the dancing of more stars than I'd ever dreamed existed in the Universe.\n \n There wasn't anyone on the deck, as far as I could see. And this distance from the grav helix, the ship seemed mighty quiet and lonely. If I just took one quick look....\n \n But I thought of what Sis would say and I turned around obediently. Then I saw the big red sign again. \"Passengers not permitted\u2014\"\n \n Well! Didn't I know from my civics class that only women could be Earth Citizens these days? Sure, ever since the Male Desuffrage Act. And didn't I know that you had to be a citizen of a planet in order to get an interplanetary passport? Sis had explained it all to me in the careful, patient way she always talks politics and things like that to men.\n \n \"Technically, Ferdinand, I'm the only passenger in our family. You can't be one, because, not being a citizen, you can't acquire an Earth Passport. However, you'll be going to Venus on the strength of this clause\u2014'Miss Evelyn Sparling and all dependent male members of family, this number not to exceed the registered quota of sub-regulations pertaining'\u2014and so on. I want you to understand these matters, so that you will grow into a man who takes an active interest in world affairs. No matter what you hear, women really like and appreciate such men.\"\n \n Of course, I never pay much attention to Sis when she says such dumb things. I'm old enough, I guess, to know that it isn't what Women like and appreciate that counts when it comes to people getting married. If it were, Sis and three hundred other pretty girls like her wouldn't be on their way to Venus to hook husbands.\n \n Still, if I wasn't a passenger, the sign didn't have anything to do with me. I knew what Sis could say to that , but at least it was an argument I could use if it ever came up. So I broke the law.\n \n I was glad I did. The stars were exciting enough, but away off to the left, about five times as big as I'd ever seen it, except in the movies, was the Moon, a great blob of gray and white pockmarks holding off the black of space. I was hoping to see the Earth, but I figured it must be on the other side of the ship or behind us. I pressed my nose against the port and saw the tiny flicker of a spaceliner taking off, Marsbound. I wished I was on that one!\n \n Then I noticed, a little farther down the companionway, a stretch of blank wall where there should have been portholes. High up on the wall in glowing red letters were the words, \"Lifeboat 47. Passengers: Thirty-two. Crew: Eleven. Unauthorized personnel keep away!\"\n \n Another one of those signs.\n \n \n\n \n I crept up to the porthole nearest it and could just barely make out the stern jets where it was plastered against the hull. Then I walked under the sign and tried to figure the way you were supposed to get into it. There was a very thin line going around in a big circle that I knew must be the door. But I couldn't see any knobs or switches to open it with. Not even a button you could press.\n \n That meant it was a sonic lock like the kind we had on the outer keeps back home in Undersea. But knock or voice? I tried the two knock combinations I knew, and nothing happened. I only remembered one voice key\u2014might as well see if that's it, I figured.\n \n \"Twenty, Twenty-three. Open Sesame.\"\n \n For a second, I thought I'd hit it just right out of all the million possible combinations\u2014The door clicked inward toward a black hole, and a hairy hand as broad as my shoulders shot out of the hole. It closed around my throat and plucked me inside as if I'd been a baby sardine.\n \n I bounced once on the hard lifeboat floor. Before I got my breath and sat up, the door had been shut again. When the light came on, I found myself staring up the muzzle of a highly polished blaster and into the cold blue eyes of the biggest man I'd ever seen.\n \n \n\n \n He was wearing a one-piece suit made of some scaly green stuff that looked hard and soft at the same time.\n \n His boots were made of it too, and so was the hood hanging down his back.\n \n And his face was brown. Not just ordinary tan, you understand, but the deep, dark, burned-all-the-way-in brown I'd seen on the lifeguards in New Orleans whenever we took a surface vacation\u2014the kind of tan that comes from day after broiling day under a really hot Sun. His hair looked as if it had once been blond, but now there were just long combed-out waves with a yellowish tinge that boiled all the way down to his shoulders.\n \n I hadn't seen hair like that on a man except maybe in history books; every man I'd ever known had his hair cropped in the fashionable soup-bowl style. I was staring at his hair, almost forgetting about the blaster which I knew it was against the law for him to have at all, when I suddenly got scared right through.\n \n His eyes.\n \n They didn't blink and there seemed to be no expression around them. Just coldness. Maybe it was the kind of clothes he was wearing that did it, but all of a sudden I was reminded of a crocodile I'd seen in a surface zoo that had stared quietly at me for twenty minutes until it opened two long tooth-studded jaws.\n \n \"Green shatas!\" he said suddenly. \"Only a tadpole. I must be getting jumpy enough to splash.\"\n \n Then he shoved the blaster away in a holster made of the same scaly leather, crossed his arms on his chest and began to study me. I grunted to my feet, feeling a lot better. The coldness had gone out of his eyes.\n \n I held out my hand the way Sis had taught me. \"My name is Ferdinand Sparling. I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr.\u2014Mr.\u2014\"\n \n \"Hope for your sake,\" he said to me, \"that you aren't what you seem\u2014tadpole brother to one of them husbandless anura.\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n \"A 'nuran is a female looking to nest. Anura is a herd of same. Come from Flatfolk ways.\"\n \n \"Flatfolk are the Venusian natives, aren't they? Are you a Venusian? What part of Venus do you come from? Why did you say you hope\u2014\"\n \n He chuckled and swung me up into one of the bunks that lined the lifeboat. \"Questions you ask,\" he said in his soft voice. \"Venus is a sharp enough place for a dryhorn, let alone a tadpole dryhorn with a boss-minded sister.\"\n \n \"I'm not a dryleg,\" I told him proudly. \" We're from Undersea.\"\n \n \" Dryhorn , I said, not dryleg. And what's Undersea?\"\n \n \"Well, in Undersea we called foreigners and newcomers drylegs. Just like on Venus, I guess, you call them dryhorns.\" And then I told him how Undersea had been built on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, when the mineral resources of the land began to give out and engineers figured that a lot could still be reached from the sea bottoms.\n \n \n\n \n He nodded. He'd heard about the sea-bottom mining cities that were bubbling under protective domes in every one of the Earth's oceans just about the same time settlements were springing up on the planets.\n \n He looked impressed when I told him about Mom and Pop being one of the first couples to get married in Undersea. He looked thoughtful when I told him how Sis and I had been born there and spent half our childhood listening to the pressure pumps. He raised his eyebrows and looked disgusted when I told how Mom, as Undersea representative on the World Council, had been one of the framers of the Male Desuffrage Act after the Third Atomic War had resulted in the Maternal Revolution.\n \n \n\n \n He almost squeezed my arm when I got to the time Mom and Pop were blown up in a surfacing boat.\n \n \"Well, after the funeral, there was a little money, so Sis decided we might as well use it to migrate. There was no future for her on Earth, she figured. You know, the three-out-of-four.\"\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n \"The three-out-of-four. No more than three women out of every four on Earth can expect to find husbands. Not enough men to go around. Way back in the Twentieth Century, it began to be felt, Sis says, what with the wars and all. Then the wars went on and a lot more men began to die or get no good from the radioactivity. Then the best men went to the planets, Sis says, until by now even if a woman can scrounge a personal husband, he's not much to boast about.\"\n \n The stranger nodded violently. \"Not on Earth, he isn't. Those busybody anura make sure of that. What a place! Suffering gridniks, I had a bellyful!\"\n \n He told me about it. Women were scarce on Venus, and he hadn't been able to find any who were willing to come out to his lonely little islands; he had decided to go to Earth where there was supposed to be a surplus. Naturally, having been born and brought up on a very primitive planet, he didn't know \"it's a woman's world,\" like the older boys in school used to say.\n \n The moment he landed on Earth he was in trouble. He didn't know he had to register at a government-operated hotel for transient males; he threw a bartender through a thick plastic window for saying something nasty about the length of his hair; and imagine !\u2014he not only resisted arrest, resulting in three hospitalized policemen, but he sassed the judge in open court!\n \n \"Told me a man wasn't supposed to say anything except through female attorneys. Told her that where I came from, a man spoke his piece when he'd a mind to, and his woman walked by his side.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" I asked breathlessly.\n \n \"Oh, Guilty of This and Contempt of That. That blown-up brinosaur took my last munit for fines, then explained that she was remitting the rest because I was a foreigner and uneducated.\" His eyes grew dark for a moment. He chuckled again. \"But I wasn't going to serve all those fancy little prison sentences. Forcible Citizenship Indoctrination, they call it? Shook the dead-dry dust of the misbegotten, God forsaken mother world from my feet forever. The women on it deserve their men. My pockets were folded from the fines, and the paddlefeet were looking for me so close I didn't dare radio for more munit. So I stowed away.\"\n \n \n\n \n For a moment, I didn't understand him. When I did, I was almost ill.\n\"Y-you mean,\" I choked, \"th-that you're b-breaking the law right now? And I'm with you while you're doing it?\"\n \n He leaned over the edge of the bunk and stared at me very seriously.\n\"What breed of tadpole are they turning out these days? Besides, what business do you have this close to the hull?\"\n \n After a moment of sober reflection, I nodded. \"You're right. I've also become a male outside the law. We're in this together.\"\n \n He guffawed. Then he sat up and began cleaning his blaster. I found myself drawn to the bright killer-tube with exactly the fascination Sis insists such things have always had for men.\n \n \"Ferdinand your label? That's not right for a sprouting tadpole. I'll call you Ford. My name's Butt. Butt Lee Brown.\"\n \n I liked the sound of Ford. \"Is Butt a nickname, too?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Short for Alberta, but I haven't found a man who can draw a blaster fast enough to call me that. You see, Pop came over in the eighties\u2014the big wave of immigrants when they evacuated Ontario. Named all us boys after Canadian provinces. I was the youngest, so I got the name they were saving for a girl.\"\n \n \"You had a lot of brothers, Mr. Butt?\"\n \n He grinned with a mighty set of teeth. \"Oh, a nestful. Of course, they were all killed in the Blue Chicago Rising by the MacGregor boys\u2014all except me and Saskatchewan. Then Sas and me hunted the MacGregors down. Took a heap of time; we didn't float Jock MacGregor's ugly face down the Tuscany till both of us were pretty near grown up.\"\n \n I walked up close to where I could see the tiny bright copper coils of the blaster above the firing button. \"Have you killed a lot of men with that, Mr. Butt?\"\n \n \"Butt. Just plain Butt to you, Ford.\" He frowned and sighted at the light globe. \"No more'n twelve\u2014not counting five government paddlefeet, of course. I'm a peaceable planter. Way I figure it, violence never accomplishes much that's important. My brother Sas, now\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n He had just begun to work into a wonderful anecdote about his brother when the dinner gong rang. Butt told me to scat. He said I was a growing tadpole and needed my vitamins. And he mentioned, very off-hand, that he wouldn't at all object if I brought him some fresh fruit. It seemed there was nothing but processed foods in the lifeboat and Butt was used to a farmer's diet.\n \n Trouble was, he was a special kind of farmer. Ordinary fruit would have been pretty easy to sneak into my pockets at meals. I even found a way to handle the kelp and giant watercress Mr. Brown liked, but things like seaweed salt and Venusian mud-grapes just had too strong a smell. Twice, the mechanical hamper refused to accept my jacket for laundering and I had to wash it myself. But I learned so many wonderful things about Venus every time I visited that stowaway....\n \n I learned three wild-wave songs of the Flatfolk and what it is that the native Venusians hate so much; I learned how you tell the difference between a lousy government paddlefoot from New Kalamazoo and the slaptoe slinker who is the planter's friend. After a lot of begging, Butt Lee Brown explained the workings of his blaster, explained it so carefully that I could name every part and tell what it did from the tiny round electrodes to the long spirals of transformer. But no matter what, he would never let me hold it.\n \n \"Sorry, Ford, old tad,\" he would drawl, spinning around and around in the control swivel-chair at the nose of the lifeboat. \"But way I look at it, a man who lets somebody else handle his blaster is like the giant whose heart was in an egg that an enemy found. When you've grown enough so's your pop feels you ought to have a weapon, why, then's the time to learn it and you might's well learn fast. Before then, you're plain too young to be even near it.\"\n \n \"I don't have a father to give me one when I come of age. I don't even have an older brother as head of my family like your brother Labrador. All I have is Sis. And she \u2014\"\n \n \"She'll marry some fancy dryhorn who's never been farther South than the Polar Coast. And she'll stay head of the family, if I know her breed of green shata. Bossy, opinionated. By the way, Fordie,\" he said, rising and stretching so the fish-leather bounced and rippled off his biceps, \"that sister. She ever....\"\n \n And he'd be off again, cross-examining me about Evelyn. I sat in the swivel chair he'd vacated and tried to answer his questions. But there was a lot of stuff I didn't know. Evelyn was a healthy girl, for instance; how healthy, exactly, I had no way of finding out. Yes, I'd tell him, my aunts on both sides of my family each had had more than the average number of children. No, we'd never done any farming to speak of, back in Undersea, but\u2014yes, I'd guess Evelyn knew about as much as any girl there when it came to diving equipment and pressure pump regulation.\n \n How would I know that stuff would lead to trouble for me?\n \n \n\n \n Sis had insisted I come along to the geography lecture. Most of the other girls who were going to Venus for husbands talked to each other during the lecture, but not my sister! She hung on every word, took notes even, and asked enough questions to make the perspiring purser really work in those orientation periods.\n \n \"I am very sorry, Miss Sparling,\" he said with pretty heavy sarcasm,\n\"but I cannot remember any of the agricultural products of the Macro Continent. Since the human population is well below one per thousand square miles, it can readily be understood that the quantity of tilled soil, land or sub-surface, is so small that\u2014Wait, I remember something. The Macro Continent exports a fruit though not exactly an edible one. The wild dunging drug is harvested there by criminal speculators. Contrary to belief on Earth, the traffic has been growing in recent years. In fact\u2014\"\n \n \"Pardon me, sir,\" I broke in, \"but doesn't dunging come only from Leif Erickson Island off the Moscow Peninsula of the Macro Continent? You remember, purser\u2014Wang Li's third exploration, where he proved the island and the peninsula didn't meet for most of the year?\"\n \n The purser nodded slowly. \"I forgot,\" he admitted. \"Sorry, ladies, but the boy's right. Please make the correction in your notes.\"\n \n But Sis was the only one who took notes, and she didn't take that one. She stared at me for a moment, biting her lower lip thoughtfully, while I got sicker and sicker. Then she shut her pad with the final gesture of the right hand that Mom used to use just before challenging the opposition to come right down on the Council floor and debate it out with her.\n \n \"Ferdinand,\" Sis said, \"let's go back to our cabin.\"\n \n The moment she sat me down and walked slowly around me, I knew I was in for it. \"I've been reading up on Venusian geography in the ship's library,\" I told her in a hurry.\n \n \"No doubt,\" she said drily. She shook her night-black hair out. \"But you aren't going to tell me that you read about dunging in the ship's library. The books there have been censored by a government agent of Earth against the possibility that they might be read by susceptible young male minds like yours. She would not have allowed\u2014this Terran Agent\u2014\"\n \n \"Paddlefoot,\" I sneered.\n \n Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. \"Now that's a term,\" she said carefully, \"that is used only by Venusian riffraff.\"\n \n \"They're not!\"\n \n \"Not what?\"\n \n \"Riffraff,\" I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away!\n\"They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus.\"\n \n \"Does it, now?\" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. \"Tell me more.\"\n \n \"You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary\u2014with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later.\"\n \n \"You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!\"\n \n \"Nobody!\" I insisted. \"They're my own ideas!\"\n \n \"They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand\u2014after I have found a good, steady husband, of course\u2014and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?\"\n \n \n\n \n I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor.\n \n \"What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?\"\n \n A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. \"One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit.\"\n \n \"The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?\"\n \n \"Nobody! Nobody! \"\n \n \"Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand\u2014\"\n \n \"I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford.\"\n \n \"Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand....\"\n \n After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl.\n \n All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better.\n \n The door opened on the signal, \"Sesame.\" When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures.\n \n He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back.\n \n \"An honor, Miss Sparling,\" he said in that rumbly voice. \"Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft.\"\n \n So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly.\n \n \"First, Mr. Brown,\" she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, \"you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?\"\n \n \n\n \n He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm.\n \n \"I take it you either have no defense or care to make none,\" Sis added caustically.\n \n Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word.\n\"Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus.\"\n \n \"We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before\u2014\"\n \n \"Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world.\"\n \n \"It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown.\" Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, \"What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?\"\n \n \n\n \n He cocked his head and considered a moment. \"Look,\" he said finally,\n\"I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat\u2014don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said bitterly. \"You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?\"\n \n \"No, Sis, he didn't,\" I was beginning to argue. \"All he wanted\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences.\"\n \n \"Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?\"\n \n He waved his hands at her impatiently. \"I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's.\"\n \n Sis actually staggered back. \"Let's? Let's what ? Are\u2014are you daring to suggest that\u2014that\u2014\"\n \n \"Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too.\"\n \n I was so excited I just had to yell: \"Gee, Sis, say yes !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28164, "query_start_index": 28166, "query_end_index": 28206, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ferdinand is a young man accompanying his sister Evelyn on a spaceliner called the Eleanor Roosevelt with 300 hundred other women. The final destination of the spaceship is Venus, where the women hope to find a husband. Although women are in charge, the crew of the ship is all men. Ferdinand decides to explore the ship, and he encounters a large red sign forbidding passengers from entering the next deck. Despite being hesitant at first, he decides to break the law anyway because he is technically not a passenger on the ship. Ferdinand is amazed to see the stars, the moon, and another spaceliner take off in space. Unfazed by the next sign that tells unauthorized personnel to leave, he goes to the porthole and tries to figure out a way to open it by trying various methods. Suddenly, the door opens, and a large man plucks him inside by the throat. The man recognizes him as a brother to one of the Anura, which he defines as a herd of women looking for mates. Ferdinand explains his childhood in the Undersea and his parents, to which the other man listens intently. He also mentions that he and his sister have left Earth because she realized there would be no future there. All men have either died in wars, become negatively affected by radioactivity, or gone off to the planets. Then, the older man explains that there are little to no women on Venus, and he had no idea that women were in charge when he first went to Earth to find a wife. He had been arrested and was charged but decided to become a stowaway instead. The man, who introduces himself as Alberta (Butt) Lee Brown, gives Ferdinand the nickname Ford and talks more about his past. Eventually, he asks more about Evelyn, and Ferdinand does not overthink his intentions when he answers. Later, Evelyn then forces Ferdinand to go to a geography lecture with her, where she continuously asks questions and takes notes. However, she does not write down his answer after he corrects the purser and instead takes him back to the cabin to lecture him. They begin to debate, and Ferdinand begins to use the words and knowledge he learned from Butt. Evelyn is suspicious that somebody has been feeding him rebellious opinions, and she begins to hound him for answers after seeing he has a photo of her in his pocket. He then takes Evelyn to see Butt, and she begins to lecture him about breaking the law. While the both of them debate over Butt\u2019s status as a criminal and stowaway, he suddenly suggests that they should get married. Evelyn is surprised by his proposal, and Ferdinand eagerly urges her to accept it. "}
{"id": "51150_1", "pid": "51150_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nVenus Is a Man's World\n \n \n BY WILLIAM TENN\n \n Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Actually, there wouldn't be too much difference if women took over the Earth altogether. But not for some men and most boys!\n \n \n \n I've always said that even if Sis is seven years older than me\u2014and a girl besides\u2014she don't always know what's best. Put me on a spaceship jam-packed with three hundred females just aching to get themselves husbands in the one place they're still to be had\u2014the planet Venus\u2014and you know I'll be in trouble.\n \n Bad trouble. With the law, which is the worst a boy can get into.\n \n Twenty minutes after we lifted from the Sahara Spaceport, I wriggled out of my acceleration hammock and started for the door of our cabin.\n \n \"Now you be careful, Ferdinand,\" Sis called after me as she opened a book called Family Problems of the Frontier Woman . \"Remember you're a nice boy. Don't make me ashamed of you.\"\n \n I tore down the corridor. Most of the cabins had purple lights on in front of the doors, showing that the girls were still inside their hammocks. That meant only the ship's crew was up and about. Ship's crews are men; women are too busy with important things like government to run ships. I felt free all over\u2014and happy. Now was my chance to really see the Eleanor Roosevelt !\n \n \n\n \n It was hard to believe I was traveling in space at last. Ahead and behind me, all the way up to where the companionway curved in out of sight, there was nothing but smooth black wall and smooth white doors\u2014on and on and on. Gee , I thought excitedly, this is one big ship !\n \n Of course, every once in a while I would run across a big scene of stars in the void set in the wall; but they were only pictures. Nothing that gave the feel of great empty space like I'd read about in The Boy Rocketeers , no portholes, no visiplates, nothing.\n \n So when I came to the crossway, I stopped for a second, then turned left. To the right, see, there was Deck Four, then Deck Three, leading inward past the engine fo'c'sle to the main jets and the grav helix going purr-purr-purrty-purr in the comforting way big machinery has when it's happy and oiled. But to the left, the crossway led all the way to the outside level which ran just under the hull. There were portholes on the hull.\n \n I'd studied all that out in our cabin, long before we'd lifted, on the transparent model of the ship hanging like a big cigar from the ceiling. Sis had studied it too, but she was looking for places like the dining salon and the library and Lifeboat 68 where we should go in case of emergency. I looked for the important things.\n \n As I trotted along the crossway, I sort of wished that Sis hadn't decided to go after a husband on a luxury liner. On a cargo ship, now, I'd be climbing from deck to deck on a ladder instead of having gravity underfoot all the time just like I was home on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But women always know what's right, and a boy can only make faces and do what they say, same as the men have to do.\n \n Still, it was pretty exciting to press my nose against the slots in the wall and see the sliding panels that could come charging out and block the crossway into an airtight fit in case a meteor or something smashed into the ship. And all along there were glass cases with spacesuits standing in them, like those knights they used to have back in the Middle Ages.\n \n \"In the event of disaster affecting the oxygen content of companionway,\" they had the words etched into the glass, \"break glass with hammer upon wall, remove spacesuit and proceed to don it in the following fashion.\"\n \n I read the \"following fashion\" until I knew it by heart. Boy , I said to myself, I hope we have that kind of disaster. I'd sure like to get into one of those! Bet it would be more fun than those diving suits back in Undersea!\n \n \n And all the time I was alone. That was the best part.\n \n \n\n \n Then I passed Deck Twelve and there was a big sign. \"Notice! Passengers not permitted past this point!\" A big sign in red.\n \n I peeked around the corner. I knew it\u2014the next deck was the hull. I could see the portholes. Every twelve feet, they were, filled with the velvet of space and the dancing of more stars than I'd ever dreamed existed in the Universe.\n \n There wasn't anyone on the deck, as far as I could see. And this distance from the grav helix, the ship seemed mighty quiet and lonely. If I just took one quick look....\n \n But I thought of what Sis would say and I turned around obediently. Then I saw the big red sign again. \"Passengers not permitted\u2014\"\n \n Well! Didn't I know from my civics class that only women could be Earth Citizens these days? Sure, ever since the Male Desuffrage Act. And didn't I know that you had to be a citizen of a planet in order to get an interplanetary passport? Sis had explained it all to me in the careful, patient way she always talks politics and things like that to men.\n \n \"Technically, Ferdinand, I'm the only passenger in our family. You can't be one, because, not being a citizen, you can't acquire an Earth Passport. However, you'll be going to Venus on the strength of this clause\u2014'Miss Evelyn Sparling and all dependent male members of family, this number not to exceed the registered quota of sub-regulations pertaining'\u2014and so on. I want you to understand these matters, so that you will grow into a man who takes an active interest in world affairs. No matter what you hear, women really like and appreciate such men.\"\n \n Of course, I never pay much attention to Sis when she says such dumb things. I'm old enough, I guess, to know that it isn't what Women like and appreciate that counts when it comes to people getting married. If it were, Sis and three hundred other pretty girls like her wouldn't be on their way to Venus to hook husbands.\n \n Still, if I wasn't a passenger, the sign didn't have anything to do with me. I knew what Sis could say to that , but at least it was an argument I could use if it ever came up. So I broke the law.\n \n I was glad I did. The stars were exciting enough, but away off to the left, about five times as big as I'd ever seen it, except in the movies, was the Moon, a great blob of gray and white pockmarks holding off the black of space. I was hoping to see the Earth, but I figured it must be on the other side of the ship or behind us. I pressed my nose against the port and saw the tiny flicker of a spaceliner taking off, Marsbound. I wished I was on that one!\n \n Then I noticed, a little farther down the companionway, a stretch of blank wall where there should have been portholes. High up on the wall in glowing red letters were the words, \"Lifeboat 47. Passengers: Thirty-two. Crew: Eleven. Unauthorized personnel keep away!\"\n \n Another one of those signs.\n \n \n\n \n I crept up to the porthole nearest it and could just barely make out the stern jets where it was plastered against the hull. Then I walked under the sign and tried to figure the way you were supposed to get into it. There was a very thin line going around in a big circle that I knew must be the door. But I couldn't see any knobs or switches to open it with. Not even a button you could press.\n \n That meant it was a sonic lock like the kind we had on the outer keeps back home in Undersea. But knock or voice? I tried the two knock combinations I knew, and nothing happened. I only remembered one voice key\u2014might as well see if that's it, I figured.\n \n \"Twenty, Twenty-three. Open Sesame.\"\n \n For a second, I thought I'd hit it just right out of all the million possible combinations\u2014The door clicked inward toward a black hole, and a hairy hand as broad as my shoulders shot out of the hole. It closed around my throat and plucked me inside as if I'd been a baby sardine.\n \n I bounced once on the hard lifeboat floor. Before I got my breath and sat up, the door had been shut again. When the light came on, I found myself staring up the muzzle of a highly polished blaster and into the cold blue eyes of the biggest man I'd ever seen.\n \n \n\n \n He was wearing a one-piece suit made of some scaly green stuff that looked hard and soft at the same time.\n \n His boots were made of it too, and so was the hood hanging down his back.\n \n And his face was brown. Not just ordinary tan, you understand, but the deep, dark, burned-all-the-way-in brown I'd seen on the lifeguards in New Orleans whenever we took a surface vacation\u2014the kind of tan that comes from day after broiling day under a really hot Sun. His hair looked as if it had once been blond, but now there were just long combed-out waves with a yellowish tinge that boiled all the way down to his shoulders.\n \n I hadn't seen hair like that on a man except maybe in history books; every man I'd ever known had his hair cropped in the fashionable soup-bowl style. I was staring at his hair, almost forgetting about the blaster which I knew it was against the law for him to have at all, when I suddenly got scared right through.\n \n His eyes.\n \n They didn't blink and there seemed to be no expression around them. Just coldness. Maybe it was the kind of clothes he was wearing that did it, but all of a sudden I was reminded of a crocodile I'd seen in a surface zoo that had stared quietly at me for twenty minutes until it opened two long tooth-studded jaws.\n \n \"Green shatas!\" he said suddenly. \"Only a tadpole. I must be getting jumpy enough to splash.\"\n \n Then he shoved the blaster away in a holster made of the same scaly leather, crossed his arms on his chest and began to study me. I grunted to my feet, feeling a lot better. The coldness had gone out of his eyes.\n \n I held out my hand the way Sis had taught me. \"My name is Ferdinand Sparling. I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr.\u2014Mr.\u2014\"\n \n \"Hope for your sake,\" he said to me, \"that you aren't what you seem\u2014tadpole brother to one of them husbandless anura.\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n \"A 'nuran is a female looking to nest. Anura is a herd of same. Come from Flatfolk ways.\"\n \n \"Flatfolk are the Venusian natives, aren't they? Are you a Venusian? What part of Venus do you come from? Why did you say you hope\u2014\"\n \n He chuckled and swung me up into one of the bunks that lined the lifeboat. \"Questions you ask,\" he said in his soft voice. \"Venus is a sharp enough place for a dryhorn, let alone a tadpole dryhorn with a boss-minded sister.\"\n \n \"I'm not a dryleg,\" I told him proudly. \" We're from Undersea.\"\n \n \" Dryhorn , I said, not dryleg. And what's Undersea?\"\n \n \"Well, in Undersea we called foreigners and newcomers drylegs. Just like on Venus, I guess, you call them dryhorns.\" And then I told him how Undersea had been built on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, when the mineral resources of the land began to give out and engineers figured that a lot could still be reached from the sea bottoms.\n \n \n\n \n He nodded. He'd heard about the sea-bottom mining cities that were bubbling under protective domes in every one of the Earth's oceans just about the same time settlements were springing up on the planets.\n \n He looked impressed when I told him about Mom and Pop being one of the first couples to get married in Undersea. He looked thoughtful when I told him how Sis and I had been born there and spent half our childhood listening to the pressure pumps. He raised his eyebrows and looked disgusted when I told how Mom, as Undersea representative on the World Council, had been one of the framers of the Male Desuffrage Act after the Third Atomic War had resulted in the Maternal Revolution.\n \n \n\n \n He almost squeezed my arm when I got to the time Mom and Pop were blown up in a surfacing boat.\n \n \"Well, after the funeral, there was a little money, so Sis decided we might as well use it to migrate. There was no future for her on Earth, she figured. You know, the three-out-of-four.\"\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n \"The three-out-of-four. No more than three women out of every four on Earth can expect to find husbands. Not enough men to go around. Way back in the Twentieth Century, it began to be felt, Sis says, what with the wars and all. Then the wars went on and a lot more men began to die or get no good from the radioactivity. Then the best men went to the planets, Sis says, until by now even if a woman can scrounge a personal husband, he's not much to boast about.\"\n \n The stranger nodded violently. \"Not on Earth, he isn't. Those busybody anura make sure of that. What a place! Suffering gridniks, I had a bellyful!\"\n \n He told me about it. Women were scarce on Venus, and he hadn't been able to find any who were willing to come out to his lonely little islands; he had decided to go to Earth where there was supposed to be a surplus. Naturally, having been born and brought up on a very primitive planet, he didn't know \"it's a woman's world,\" like the older boys in school used to say.\n \n The moment he landed on Earth he was in trouble. He didn't know he had to register at a government-operated hotel for transient males; he threw a bartender through a thick plastic window for saying something nasty about the length of his hair; and imagine !\u2014he not only resisted arrest, resulting in three hospitalized policemen, but he sassed the judge in open court!\n \n \"Told me a man wasn't supposed to say anything except through female attorneys. Told her that where I came from, a man spoke his piece when he'd a mind to, and his woman walked by his side.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" I asked breathlessly.\n \n \"Oh, Guilty of This and Contempt of That. That blown-up brinosaur took my last munit for fines, then explained that she was remitting the rest because I was a foreigner and uneducated.\" His eyes grew dark for a moment. He chuckled again. \"But I wasn't going to serve all those fancy little prison sentences. Forcible Citizenship Indoctrination, they call it? Shook the dead-dry dust of the misbegotten, God forsaken mother world from my feet forever. The women on it deserve their men. My pockets were folded from the fines, and the paddlefeet were looking for me so close I didn't dare radio for more munit. So I stowed away.\"\n \n \n\n \n For a moment, I didn't understand him. When I did, I was almost ill.\n\"Y-you mean,\" I choked, \"th-that you're b-breaking the law right now? And I'm with you while you're doing it?\"\n \n He leaned over the edge of the bunk and stared at me very seriously.\n\"What breed of tadpole are they turning out these days? Besides, what business do you have this close to the hull?\"\n \n After a moment of sober reflection, I nodded. \"You're right. I've also become a male outside the law. We're in this together.\"\n \n He guffawed. Then he sat up and began cleaning his blaster. I found myself drawn to the bright killer-tube with exactly the fascination Sis insists such things have always had for men.\n \n \"Ferdinand your label? That's not right for a sprouting tadpole. I'll call you Ford. My name's Butt. Butt Lee Brown.\"\n \n I liked the sound of Ford. \"Is Butt a nickname, too?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Short for Alberta, but I haven't found a man who can draw a blaster fast enough to call me that. You see, Pop came over in the eighties\u2014the big wave of immigrants when they evacuated Ontario. Named all us boys after Canadian provinces. I was the youngest, so I got the name they were saving for a girl.\"\n \n \"You had a lot of brothers, Mr. Butt?\"\n \n He grinned with a mighty set of teeth. \"Oh, a nestful. Of course, they were all killed in the Blue Chicago Rising by the MacGregor boys\u2014all except me and Saskatchewan. Then Sas and me hunted the MacGregors down. Took a heap of time; we didn't float Jock MacGregor's ugly face down the Tuscany till both of us were pretty near grown up.\"\n \n I walked up close to where I could see the tiny bright copper coils of the blaster above the firing button. \"Have you killed a lot of men with that, Mr. Butt?\"\n \n \"Butt. Just plain Butt to you, Ford.\" He frowned and sighted at the light globe. \"No more'n twelve\u2014not counting five government paddlefeet, of course. I'm a peaceable planter. Way I figure it, violence never accomplishes much that's important. My brother Sas, now\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n He had just begun to work into a wonderful anecdote about his brother when the dinner gong rang. Butt told me to scat. He said I was a growing tadpole and needed my vitamins. And he mentioned, very off-hand, that he wouldn't at all object if I brought him some fresh fruit. It seemed there was nothing but processed foods in the lifeboat and Butt was used to a farmer's diet.\n \n Trouble was, he was a special kind of farmer. Ordinary fruit would have been pretty easy to sneak into my pockets at meals. I even found a way to handle the kelp and giant watercress Mr. Brown liked, but things like seaweed salt and Venusian mud-grapes just had too strong a smell. Twice, the mechanical hamper refused to accept my jacket for laundering and I had to wash it myself. But I learned so many wonderful things about Venus every time I visited that stowaway....\n \n I learned three wild-wave songs of the Flatfolk and what it is that the native Venusians hate so much; I learned how you tell the difference between a lousy government paddlefoot from New Kalamazoo and the slaptoe slinker who is the planter's friend. After a lot of begging, Butt Lee Brown explained the workings of his blaster, explained it so carefully that I could name every part and tell what it did from the tiny round electrodes to the long spirals of transformer. But no matter what, he would never let me hold it.\n \n \"Sorry, Ford, old tad,\" he would drawl, spinning around and around in the control swivel-chair at the nose of the lifeboat. \"But way I look at it, a man who lets somebody else handle his blaster is like the giant whose heart was in an egg that an enemy found. When you've grown enough so's your pop feels you ought to have a weapon, why, then's the time to learn it and you might's well learn fast. Before then, you're plain too young to be even near it.\"\n \n \"I don't have a father to give me one when I come of age. I don't even have an older brother as head of my family like your brother Labrador. All I have is Sis. And she \u2014\"\n \n \"She'll marry some fancy dryhorn who's never been farther South than the Polar Coast. And she'll stay head of the family, if I know her breed of green shata. Bossy, opinionated. By the way, Fordie,\" he said, rising and stretching so the fish-leather bounced and rippled off his biceps, \"that sister. She ever....\"\n \n And he'd be off again, cross-examining me about Evelyn. I sat in the swivel chair he'd vacated and tried to answer his questions. But there was a lot of stuff I didn't know. Evelyn was a healthy girl, for instance; how healthy, exactly, I had no way of finding out. Yes, I'd tell him, my aunts on both sides of my family each had had more than the average number of children. No, we'd never done any farming to speak of, back in Undersea, but\u2014yes, I'd guess Evelyn knew about as much as any girl there when it came to diving equipment and pressure pump regulation.\n \n How would I know that stuff would lead to trouble for me?\n \n \n\n \n Sis had insisted I come along to the geography lecture. Most of the other girls who were going to Venus for husbands talked to each other during the lecture, but not my sister! She hung on every word, took notes even, and asked enough questions to make the perspiring purser really work in those orientation periods.\n \n \"I am very sorry, Miss Sparling,\" he said with pretty heavy sarcasm,\n\"but I cannot remember any of the agricultural products of the Macro Continent. Since the human population is well below one per thousand square miles, it can readily be understood that the quantity of tilled soil, land or sub-surface, is so small that\u2014Wait, I remember something. The Macro Continent exports a fruit though not exactly an edible one. The wild dunging drug is harvested there by criminal speculators. Contrary to belief on Earth, the traffic has been growing in recent years. In fact\u2014\"\n \n \"Pardon me, sir,\" I broke in, \"but doesn't dunging come only from Leif Erickson Island off the Moscow Peninsula of the Macro Continent? You remember, purser\u2014Wang Li's third exploration, where he proved the island and the peninsula didn't meet for most of the year?\"\n \n The purser nodded slowly. \"I forgot,\" he admitted. \"Sorry, ladies, but the boy's right. Please make the correction in your notes.\"\n \n But Sis was the only one who took notes, and she didn't take that one. She stared at me for a moment, biting her lower lip thoughtfully, while I got sicker and sicker. Then she shut her pad with the final gesture of the right hand that Mom used to use just before challenging the opposition to come right down on the Council floor and debate it out with her.\n \n \"Ferdinand,\" Sis said, \"let's go back to our cabin.\"\n \n The moment she sat me down and walked slowly around me, I knew I was in for it. \"I've been reading up on Venusian geography in the ship's library,\" I told her in a hurry.\n \n \"No doubt,\" she said drily. She shook her night-black hair out. \"But you aren't going to tell me that you read about dunging in the ship's library. The books there have been censored by a government agent of Earth against the possibility that they might be read by susceptible young male minds like yours. She would not have allowed\u2014this Terran Agent\u2014\"\n \n \"Paddlefoot,\" I sneered.\n \n Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. \"Now that's a term,\" she said carefully, \"that is used only by Venusian riffraff.\"\n \n \"They're not!\"\n \n \"Not what?\"\n \n \"Riffraff,\" I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away!\n\"They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus.\"\n \n \"Does it, now?\" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. \"Tell me more.\"\n \n \"You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary\u2014with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later.\"\n \n \"You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!\"\n \n \"Nobody!\" I insisted. \"They're my own ideas!\"\n \n \"They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand\u2014after I have found a good, steady husband, of course\u2014and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?\"\n \n \n\n \n I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor.\n \n \"What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?\"\n \n A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. \"One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit.\"\n \n \"The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?\"\n \n \"Nobody! Nobody! \"\n \n \"Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand\u2014\"\n \n \"I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford.\"\n \n \"Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand....\"\n \n After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl.\n \n All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better.\n \n The door opened on the signal, \"Sesame.\" When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures.\n \n He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back.\n \n \"An honor, Miss Sparling,\" he said in that rumbly voice. \"Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft.\"\n \n So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly.\n \n \"First, Mr. Brown,\" she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, \"you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?\"\n \n \n\n \n He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm.\n \n \"I take it you either have no defense or care to make none,\" Sis added caustically.\n \n Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word.\n\"Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus.\"\n \n \"We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before\u2014\"\n \n \"Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world.\"\n \n \"It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown.\" Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, \"What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?\"\n \n \n\n \n He cocked his head and considered a moment. \"Look,\" he said finally,\n\"I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat\u2014don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said bitterly. \"You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?\"\n \n \"No, Sis, he didn't,\" I was beginning to argue. \"All he wanted\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences.\"\n \n \"Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?\"\n \n He waved his hands at her impatiently. \"I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's.\"\n \n Sis actually staggered back. \"Let's? Let's what ? Are\u2014are you daring to suggest that\u2014that\u2014\"\n \n \"Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too.\"\n \n I was so excited I just had to yell: \"Gee, Sis, say yes !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28164, "query_start_index": 28166, "query_end_index": 28206, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ferdinand Sparling is accompanying his older sister, Evelyn, on a trip to Venus. Society on Earth is ruled by women, and there are barely enough men for each, so many women take a trip to Venus, where men are in surplus, to find a husband. Ferdinand and Evelyn are aboard the Eleanor Roosevelt. Ferdinand decides to explore the ship alone, coming across rooms and areas that passengers are not allowed to go past; he notes that he wasn't really a passenger, because men weren't citizens, and explores them anyway. Ferdinand comes across Lifeboat 47, whose doors are voice activated. He tries to open the doors, and is then pulled inside by a strange, large man with long hair. Ferdinand introduces himself, and quickly learns that the man is a Venusian. Ferdinand tells him about Undersea, where he and Evelyn are from, and his family, including the death of his parents and Evelyn's decision to migrate in search of a husband afterwards. The man tells Ferdinand about growing up on Venus, about how there, it was still a man's world. He had visited Earth to find a wife, but unaware of society there, was quickly in trouble and sentenced to prison. To avoid going broke, he stowed away on the ship. The man introduces himself as Butt, his full name being Alberta Lee Brown, and begins calling Ferdinand \"Ford\". Butt continues telling stories of Venus, such as stories of his brothers, Venusian songs and vocabulary, and Butt's blaster, a weapon that he does not allow Ford to touch. Ferdinand begins visiting Butt regularly, bringing him fresh fruit from the dining hall. Butt starts to gain interest in Evelyn, and Ferdinand answers questions about her for him. One day, Ferdinand and Evelyn are in a geography lecture, where Ferdinand discusses dunging, a concept that has been censored by Earth's libraries. This makes Evelyn suspicious, and she interrogates Ferdinand about where he got the information. Ferdinand digs his hole deeper, using Venusian vocabulary and sharing ideas of male dominance. Evelyn then finds a picture of her in Ferdinand's pocket, and demands to know what man he is speaking to. Ferdinand confesses and tells Evelyn about Butt, and he takes her to visit him. There, she yells at Butt, and threatens legal action, and Butt then makes a surprising proposal; he suggests the two get married."}
{"id": "51150_1", "pid": "51150_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nVenus Is a Man's World\n \n \n BY WILLIAM TENN\n \n Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Actually, there wouldn't be too much difference if women took over the Earth altogether. But not for some men and most boys!\n \n \n \n I've always said that even if Sis is seven years older than me\u2014and a girl besides\u2014she don't always know what's best. Put me on a spaceship jam-packed with three hundred females just aching to get themselves husbands in the one place they're still to be had\u2014the planet Venus\u2014and you know I'll be in trouble.\n \n Bad trouble. With the law, which is the worst a boy can get into.\n \n Twenty minutes after we lifted from the Sahara Spaceport, I wriggled out of my acceleration hammock and started for the door of our cabin.\n \n \"Now you be careful, Ferdinand,\" Sis called after me as she opened a book called Family Problems of the Frontier Woman . \"Remember you're a nice boy. Don't make me ashamed of you.\"\n \n I tore down the corridor. Most of the cabins had purple lights on in front of the doors, showing that the girls were still inside their hammocks. That meant only the ship's crew was up and about. Ship's crews are men; women are too busy with important things like government to run ships. I felt free all over\u2014and happy. Now was my chance to really see the Eleanor Roosevelt !\n \n \n\n \n It was hard to believe I was traveling in space at last. Ahead and behind me, all the way up to where the companionway curved in out of sight, there was nothing but smooth black wall and smooth white doors\u2014on and on and on. Gee , I thought excitedly, this is one big ship !\n \n Of course, every once in a while I would run across a big scene of stars in the void set in the wall; but they were only pictures. Nothing that gave the feel of great empty space like I'd read about in The Boy Rocketeers , no portholes, no visiplates, nothing.\n \n So when I came to the crossway, I stopped for a second, then turned left. To the right, see, there was Deck Four, then Deck Three, leading inward past the engine fo'c'sle to the main jets and the grav helix going purr-purr-purrty-purr in the comforting way big machinery has when it's happy and oiled. But to the left, the crossway led all the way to the outside level which ran just under the hull. There were portholes on the hull.\n \n I'd studied all that out in our cabin, long before we'd lifted, on the transparent model of the ship hanging like a big cigar from the ceiling. Sis had studied it too, but she was looking for places like the dining salon and the library and Lifeboat 68 where we should go in case of emergency. I looked for the important things.\n \n As I trotted along the crossway, I sort of wished that Sis hadn't decided to go after a husband on a luxury liner. On a cargo ship, now, I'd be climbing from deck to deck on a ladder instead of having gravity underfoot all the time just like I was home on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But women always know what's right, and a boy can only make faces and do what they say, same as the men have to do.\n \n Still, it was pretty exciting to press my nose against the slots in the wall and see the sliding panels that could come charging out and block the crossway into an airtight fit in case a meteor or something smashed into the ship. And all along there were glass cases with spacesuits standing in them, like those knights they used to have back in the Middle Ages.\n \n \"In the event of disaster affecting the oxygen content of companionway,\" they had the words etched into the glass, \"break glass with hammer upon wall, remove spacesuit and proceed to don it in the following fashion.\"\n \n I read the \"following fashion\" until I knew it by heart. Boy , I said to myself, I hope we have that kind of disaster. I'd sure like to get into one of those! Bet it would be more fun than those diving suits back in Undersea!\n \n \n And all the time I was alone. That was the best part.\n \n \n\n \n Then I passed Deck Twelve and there was a big sign. \"Notice! Passengers not permitted past this point!\" A big sign in red.\n \n I peeked around the corner. I knew it\u2014the next deck was the hull. I could see the portholes. Every twelve feet, they were, filled with the velvet of space and the dancing of more stars than I'd ever dreamed existed in the Universe.\n \n There wasn't anyone on the deck, as far as I could see. And this distance from the grav helix, the ship seemed mighty quiet and lonely. If I just took one quick look....\n \n But I thought of what Sis would say and I turned around obediently. Then I saw the big red sign again. \"Passengers not permitted\u2014\"\n \n Well! Didn't I know from my civics class that only women could be Earth Citizens these days? Sure, ever since the Male Desuffrage Act. And didn't I know that you had to be a citizen of a planet in order to get an interplanetary passport? Sis had explained it all to me in the careful, patient way she always talks politics and things like that to men.\n \n \"Technically, Ferdinand, I'm the only passenger in our family. You can't be one, because, not being a citizen, you can't acquire an Earth Passport. However, you'll be going to Venus on the strength of this clause\u2014'Miss Evelyn Sparling and all dependent male members of family, this number not to exceed the registered quota of sub-regulations pertaining'\u2014and so on. I want you to understand these matters, so that you will grow into a man who takes an active interest in world affairs. No matter what you hear, women really like and appreciate such men.\"\n \n Of course, I never pay much attention to Sis when she says such dumb things. I'm old enough, I guess, to know that it isn't what Women like and appreciate that counts when it comes to people getting married. If it were, Sis and three hundred other pretty girls like her wouldn't be on their way to Venus to hook husbands.\n \n Still, if I wasn't a passenger, the sign didn't have anything to do with me. I knew what Sis could say to that , but at least it was an argument I could use if it ever came up. So I broke the law.\n \n I was glad I did. The stars were exciting enough, but away off to the left, about five times as big as I'd ever seen it, except in the movies, was the Moon, a great blob of gray and white pockmarks holding off the black of space. I was hoping to see the Earth, but I figured it must be on the other side of the ship or behind us. I pressed my nose against the port and saw the tiny flicker of a spaceliner taking off, Marsbound. I wished I was on that one!\n \n Then I noticed, a little farther down the companionway, a stretch of blank wall where there should have been portholes. High up on the wall in glowing red letters were the words, \"Lifeboat 47. Passengers: Thirty-two. Crew: Eleven. Unauthorized personnel keep away!\"\n \n Another one of those signs.\n \n \n\n \n I crept up to the porthole nearest it and could just barely make out the stern jets where it was plastered against the hull. Then I walked under the sign and tried to figure the way you were supposed to get into it. There was a very thin line going around in a big circle that I knew must be the door. But I couldn't see any knobs or switches to open it with. Not even a button you could press.\n \n That meant it was a sonic lock like the kind we had on the outer keeps back home in Undersea. But knock or voice? I tried the two knock combinations I knew, and nothing happened. I only remembered one voice key\u2014might as well see if that's it, I figured.\n \n \"Twenty, Twenty-three. Open Sesame.\"\n \n For a second, I thought I'd hit it just right out of all the million possible combinations\u2014The door clicked inward toward a black hole, and a hairy hand as broad as my shoulders shot out of the hole. It closed around my throat and plucked me inside as if I'd been a baby sardine.\n \n I bounced once on the hard lifeboat floor. Before I got my breath and sat up, the door had been shut again. When the light came on, I found myself staring up the muzzle of a highly polished blaster and into the cold blue eyes of the biggest man I'd ever seen.\n \n \n\n \n He was wearing a one-piece suit made of some scaly green stuff that looked hard and soft at the same time.\n \n His boots were made of it too, and so was the hood hanging down his back.\n \n And his face was brown. Not just ordinary tan, you understand, but the deep, dark, burned-all-the-way-in brown I'd seen on the lifeguards in New Orleans whenever we took a surface vacation\u2014the kind of tan that comes from day after broiling day under a really hot Sun. His hair looked as if it had once been blond, but now there were just long combed-out waves with a yellowish tinge that boiled all the way down to his shoulders.\n \n I hadn't seen hair like that on a man except maybe in history books; every man I'd ever known had his hair cropped in the fashionable soup-bowl style. I was staring at his hair, almost forgetting about the blaster which I knew it was against the law for him to have at all, when I suddenly got scared right through.\n \n His eyes.\n \n They didn't blink and there seemed to be no expression around them. Just coldness. Maybe it was the kind of clothes he was wearing that did it, but all of a sudden I was reminded of a crocodile I'd seen in a surface zoo that had stared quietly at me for twenty minutes until it opened two long tooth-studded jaws.\n \n \"Green shatas!\" he said suddenly. \"Only a tadpole. I must be getting jumpy enough to splash.\"\n \n Then he shoved the blaster away in a holster made of the same scaly leather, crossed his arms on his chest and began to study me. I grunted to my feet, feeling a lot better. The coldness had gone out of his eyes.\n \n I held out my hand the way Sis had taught me. \"My name is Ferdinand Sparling. I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr.\u2014Mr.\u2014\"\n \n \"Hope for your sake,\" he said to me, \"that you aren't what you seem\u2014tadpole brother to one of them husbandless anura.\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n \"A 'nuran is a female looking to nest. Anura is a herd of same. Come from Flatfolk ways.\"\n \n \"Flatfolk are the Venusian natives, aren't they? Are you a Venusian? What part of Venus do you come from? Why did you say you hope\u2014\"\n \n He chuckled and swung me up into one of the bunks that lined the lifeboat. \"Questions you ask,\" he said in his soft voice. \"Venus is a sharp enough place for a dryhorn, let alone a tadpole dryhorn with a boss-minded sister.\"\n \n \"I'm not a dryleg,\" I told him proudly. \" We're from Undersea.\"\n \n \" Dryhorn , I said, not dryleg. And what's Undersea?\"\n \n \"Well, in Undersea we called foreigners and newcomers drylegs. Just like on Venus, I guess, you call them dryhorns.\" And then I told him how Undersea had been built on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, when the mineral resources of the land began to give out and engineers figured that a lot could still be reached from the sea bottoms.\n \n \n\n \n He nodded. He'd heard about the sea-bottom mining cities that were bubbling under protective domes in every one of the Earth's oceans just about the same time settlements were springing up on the planets.\n \n He looked impressed when I told him about Mom and Pop being one of the first couples to get married in Undersea. He looked thoughtful when I told him how Sis and I had been born there and spent half our childhood listening to the pressure pumps. He raised his eyebrows and looked disgusted when I told how Mom, as Undersea representative on the World Council, had been one of the framers of the Male Desuffrage Act after the Third Atomic War had resulted in the Maternal Revolution.\n \n \n\n \n He almost squeezed my arm when I got to the time Mom and Pop were blown up in a surfacing boat.\n \n \"Well, after the funeral, there was a little money, so Sis decided we might as well use it to migrate. There was no future for her on Earth, she figured. You know, the three-out-of-four.\"\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n \"The three-out-of-four. No more than three women out of every four on Earth can expect to find husbands. Not enough men to go around. Way back in the Twentieth Century, it began to be felt, Sis says, what with the wars and all. Then the wars went on and a lot more men began to die or get no good from the radioactivity. Then the best men went to the planets, Sis says, until by now even if a woman can scrounge a personal husband, he's not much to boast about.\"\n \n The stranger nodded violently. \"Not on Earth, he isn't. Those busybody anura make sure of that. What a place! Suffering gridniks, I had a bellyful!\"\n \n He told me about it. Women were scarce on Venus, and he hadn't been able to find any who were willing to come out to his lonely little islands; he had decided to go to Earth where there was supposed to be a surplus. Naturally, having been born and brought up on a very primitive planet, he didn't know \"it's a woman's world,\" like the older boys in school used to say.\n \n The moment he landed on Earth he was in trouble. He didn't know he had to register at a government-operated hotel for transient males; he threw a bartender through a thick plastic window for saying something nasty about the length of his hair; and imagine !\u2014he not only resisted arrest, resulting in three hospitalized policemen, but he sassed the judge in open court!\n \n \"Told me a man wasn't supposed to say anything except through female attorneys. Told her that where I came from, a man spoke his piece when he'd a mind to, and his woman walked by his side.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" I asked breathlessly.\n \n \"Oh, Guilty of This and Contempt of That. That blown-up brinosaur took my last munit for fines, then explained that she was remitting the rest because I was a foreigner and uneducated.\" His eyes grew dark for a moment. He chuckled again. \"But I wasn't going to serve all those fancy little prison sentences. Forcible Citizenship Indoctrination, they call it? Shook the dead-dry dust of the misbegotten, God forsaken mother world from my feet forever. The women on it deserve their men. My pockets were folded from the fines, and the paddlefeet were looking for me so close I didn't dare radio for more munit. So I stowed away.\"\n \n \n\n \n For a moment, I didn't understand him. When I did, I was almost ill.\n\"Y-you mean,\" I choked, \"th-that you're b-breaking the law right now? And I'm with you while you're doing it?\"\n \n He leaned over the edge of the bunk and stared at me very seriously.\n\"What breed of tadpole are they turning out these days? Besides, what business do you have this close to the hull?\"\n \n After a moment of sober reflection, I nodded. \"You're right. I've also become a male outside the law. We're in this together.\"\n \n He guffawed. Then he sat up and began cleaning his blaster. I found myself drawn to the bright killer-tube with exactly the fascination Sis insists such things have always had for men.\n \n \"Ferdinand your label? That's not right for a sprouting tadpole. I'll call you Ford. My name's Butt. Butt Lee Brown.\"\n \n I liked the sound of Ford. \"Is Butt a nickname, too?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Short for Alberta, but I haven't found a man who can draw a blaster fast enough to call me that. You see, Pop came over in the eighties\u2014the big wave of immigrants when they evacuated Ontario. Named all us boys after Canadian provinces. I was the youngest, so I got the name they were saving for a girl.\"\n \n \"You had a lot of brothers, Mr. Butt?\"\n \n He grinned with a mighty set of teeth. \"Oh, a nestful. Of course, they were all killed in the Blue Chicago Rising by the MacGregor boys\u2014all except me and Saskatchewan. Then Sas and me hunted the MacGregors down. Took a heap of time; we didn't float Jock MacGregor's ugly face down the Tuscany till both of us were pretty near grown up.\"\n \n I walked up close to where I could see the tiny bright copper coils of the blaster above the firing button. \"Have you killed a lot of men with that, Mr. Butt?\"\n \n \"Butt. Just plain Butt to you, Ford.\" He frowned and sighted at the light globe. \"No more'n twelve\u2014not counting five government paddlefeet, of course. I'm a peaceable planter. Way I figure it, violence never accomplishes much that's important. My brother Sas, now\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n He had just begun to work into a wonderful anecdote about his brother when the dinner gong rang. Butt told me to scat. He said I was a growing tadpole and needed my vitamins. And he mentioned, very off-hand, that he wouldn't at all object if I brought him some fresh fruit. It seemed there was nothing but processed foods in the lifeboat and Butt was used to a farmer's diet.\n \n Trouble was, he was a special kind of farmer. Ordinary fruit would have been pretty easy to sneak into my pockets at meals. I even found a way to handle the kelp and giant watercress Mr. Brown liked, but things like seaweed salt and Venusian mud-grapes just had too strong a smell. Twice, the mechanical hamper refused to accept my jacket for laundering and I had to wash it myself. But I learned so many wonderful things about Venus every time I visited that stowaway....\n \n I learned three wild-wave songs of the Flatfolk and what it is that the native Venusians hate so much; I learned how you tell the difference between a lousy government paddlefoot from New Kalamazoo and the slaptoe slinker who is the planter's friend. After a lot of begging, Butt Lee Brown explained the workings of his blaster, explained it so carefully that I could name every part and tell what it did from the tiny round electrodes to the long spirals of transformer. But no matter what, he would never let me hold it.\n \n \"Sorry, Ford, old tad,\" he would drawl, spinning around and around in the control swivel-chair at the nose of the lifeboat. \"But way I look at it, a man who lets somebody else handle his blaster is like the giant whose heart was in an egg that an enemy found. When you've grown enough so's your pop feels you ought to have a weapon, why, then's the time to learn it and you might's well learn fast. Before then, you're plain too young to be even near it.\"\n \n \"I don't have a father to give me one when I come of age. I don't even have an older brother as head of my family like your brother Labrador. All I have is Sis. And she \u2014\"\n \n \"She'll marry some fancy dryhorn who's never been farther South than the Polar Coast. And she'll stay head of the family, if I know her breed of green shata. Bossy, opinionated. By the way, Fordie,\" he said, rising and stretching so the fish-leather bounced and rippled off his biceps, \"that sister. She ever....\"\n \n And he'd be off again, cross-examining me about Evelyn. I sat in the swivel chair he'd vacated and tried to answer his questions. But there was a lot of stuff I didn't know. Evelyn was a healthy girl, for instance; how healthy, exactly, I had no way of finding out. Yes, I'd tell him, my aunts on both sides of my family each had had more than the average number of children. No, we'd never done any farming to speak of, back in Undersea, but\u2014yes, I'd guess Evelyn knew about as much as any girl there when it came to diving equipment and pressure pump regulation.\n \n How would I know that stuff would lead to trouble for me?\n \n \n\n \n Sis had insisted I come along to the geography lecture. Most of the other girls who were going to Venus for husbands talked to each other during the lecture, but not my sister! She hung on every word, took notes even, and asked enough questions to make the perspiring purser really work in those orientation periods.\n \n \"I am very sorry, Miss Sparling,\" he said with pretty heavy sarcasm,\n\"but I cannot remember any of the agricultural products of the Macro Continent. Since the human population is well below one per thousand square miles, it can readily be understood that the quantity of tilled soil, land or sub-surface, is so small that\u2014Wait, I remember something. The Macro Continent exports a fruit though not exactly an edible one. The wild dunging drug is harvested there by criminal speculators. Contrary to belief on Earth, the traffic has been growing in recent years. In fact\u2014\"\n \n \"Pardon me, sir,\" I broke in, \"but doesn't dunging come only from Leif Erickson Island off the Moscow Peninsula of the Macro Continent? You remember, purser\u2014Wang Li's third exploration, where he proved the island and the peninsula didn't meet for most of the year?\"\n \n The purser nodded slowly. \"I forgot,\" he admitted. \"Sorry, ladies, but the boy's right. Please make the correction in your notes.\"\n \n But Sis was the only one who took notes, and she didn't take that one. She stared at me for a moment, biting her lower lip thoughtfully, while I got sicker and sicker. Then she shut her pad with the final gesture of the right hand that Mom used to use just before challenging the opposition to come right down on the Council floor and debate it out with her.\n \n \"Ferdinand,\" Sis said, \"let's go back to our cabin.\"\n \n The moment she sat me down and walked slowly around me, I knew I was in for it. \"I've been reading up on Venusian geography in the ship's library,\" I told her in a hurry.\n \n \"No doubt,\" she said drily. She shook her night-black hair out. \"But you aren't going to tell me that you read about dunging in the ship's library. The books there have been censored by a government agent of Earth against the possibility that they might be read by susceptible young male minds like yours. She would not have allowed\u2014this Terran Agent\u2014\"\n \n \"Paddlefoot,\" I sneered.\n \n Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. \"Now that's a term,\" she said carefully, \"that is used only by Venusian riffraff.\"\n \n \"They're not!\"\n \n \"Not what?\"\n \n \"Riffraff,\" I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away!\n\"They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus.\"\n \n \"Does it, now?\" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. \"Tell me more.\"\n \n \"You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary\u2014with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later.\"\n \n \"You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!\"\n \n \"Nobody!\" I insisted. \"They're my own ideas!\"\n \n \"They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand\u2014after I have found a good, steady husband, of course\u2014and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?\"\n \n \n\n \n I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor.\n \n \"What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?\"\n \n A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. \"One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit.\"\n \n \"The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?\"\n \n \"Nobody! Nobody! \"\n \n \"Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand\u2014\"\n \n \"I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford.\"\n \n \"Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand....\"\n \n After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl.\n \n All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better.\n \n The door opened on the signal, \"Sesame.\" When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures.\n \n He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back.\n \n \"An honor, Miss Sparling,\" he said in that rumbly voice. \"Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft.\"\n \n So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly.\n \n \"First, Mr. Brown,\" she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, \"you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?\"\n \n \n\n \n He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm.\n \n \"I take it you either have no defense or care to make none,\" Sis added caustically.\n \n Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word.\n\"Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus.\"\n \n \"We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before\u2014\"\n \n \"Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world.\"\n \n \"It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown.\" Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, \"What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?\"\n \n \n\n \n He cocked his head and considered a moment. \"Look,\" he said finally,\n\"I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat\u2014don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said bitterly. \"You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?\"\n \n \"No, Sis, he didn't,\" I was beginning to argue. \"All he wanted\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences.\"\n \n \"Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?\"\n \n He waved his hands at her impatiently. \"I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's.\"\n \n Sis actually staggered back. \"Let's? Let's what ? Are\u2014are you daring to suggest that\u2014that\u2014\"\n \n \"Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too.\"\n \n I was so excited I just had to yell: \"Gee, Sis, say yes !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28164, "query_start_index": 28166, "query_end_index": 28206, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ferdinand is on a spaceship with his elder sister. The ship is jam-packed with females going to Venus in search of husband and he exits the cabin while the women are still in their hammocks. The women at his times have all the rights and do all the important things since the Male Desuffrage Act, so the boy is admitted to the ship on behalf of his sister. He explores the empty ship in search of portholes and after some hesitation enters a forbidden area. There he looks at the stars and then tries to open a lock on the lifeboat. A huge scary man appears with a blaster and frighteningly cold gaze. Ferdinand explains that he comes from Undersea, an area on Earth, and tells his family story - his parents being one of the first married couples in Undersea and dying a while ago, leading to his sister's decision to migrate to Venus. The stranger, Butt, tells about the lack of women on Venus and his travel to Earth in search of a wife without any idea \"it's a woman's world\". So he got in trouble with the law and stowed away on this ship. His many brothers were killed in a rising and only one is left. From that day on Ferdinand keeps visiting the stowaway bringing fruits and listening to stories about Venus. Butt teaches the boy to use the blaster without giving it not hold and constantly asks about Evelyn, the sister. Once, Ferdinand attends a geography lecture on the ship with his sister and corrects the lecturer about Venusian geography. Evelyn starts eliciting where the boy learned that and the boy tells about real men working on Venus. Sis gets angry with those masculine ideas and doesn't believe them to come from a little boy. Ferdinand tries to lie but Sis suppresses him into confession and he leads her to Butt. She tells Butt about all the laws he has broken while the least responds with an appeal to sense. Suddenly, Butt simply proposes a mutually beneficial marriage to stop the debate. "}
{"id": "51150_1", "pid": "51150_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nVenus Is a Man's World\n \n \n BY WILLIAM TENN\n \n Illustrated by GENE FAWCETTE\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Actually, there wouldn't be too much difference if women took over the Earth altogether. But not for some men and most boys!\n \n \n \n I've always said that even if Sis is seven years older than me\u2014and a girl besides\u2014she don't always know what's best. Put me on a spaceship jam-packed with three hundred females just aching to get themselves husbands in the one place they're still to be had\u2014the planet Venus\u2014and you know I'll be in trouble.\n \n Bad trouble. With the law, which is the worst a boy can get into.\n \n Twenty minutes after we lifted from the Sahara Spaceport, I wriggled out of my acceleration hammock and started for the door of our cabin.\n \n \"Now you be careful, Ferdinand,\" Sis called after me as she opened a book called Family Problems of the Frontier Woman . \"Remember you're a nice boy. Don't make me ashamed of you.\"\n \n I tore down the corridor. Most of the cabins had purple lights on in front of the doors, showing that the girls were still inside their hammocks. That meant only the ship's crew was up and about. Ship's crews are men; women are too busy with important things like government to run ships. I felt free all over\u2014and happy. Now was my chance to really see the Eleanor Roosevelt !\n \n \n\n \n It was hard to believe I was traveling in space at last. Ahead and behind me, all the way up to where the companionway curved in out of sight, there was nothing but smooth black wall and smooth white doors\u2014on and on and on. Gee , I thought excitedly, this is one big ship !\n \n Of course, every once in a while I would run across a big scene of stars in the void set in the wall; but they were only pictures. Nothing that gave the feel of great empty space like I'd read about in The Boy Rocketeers , no portholes, no visiplates, nothing.\n \n So when I came to the crossway, I stopped for a second, then turned left. To the right, see, there was Deck Four, then Deck Three, leading inward past the engine fo'c'sle to the main jets and the grav helix going purr-purr-purrty-purr in the comforting way big machinery has when it's happy and oiled. But to the left, the crossway led all the way to the outside level which ran just under the hull. There were portholes on the hull.\n \n I'd studied all that out in our cabin, long before we'd lifted, on the transparent model of the ship hanging like a big cigar from the ceiling. Sis had studied it too, but she was looking for places like the dining salon and the library and Lifeboat 68 where we should go in case of emergency. I looked for the important things.\n \n As I trotted along the crossway, I sort of wished that Sis hadn't decided to go after a husband on a luxury liner. On a cargo ship, now, I'd be climbing from deck to deck on a ladder instead of having gravity underfoot all the time just like I was home on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But women always know what's right, and a boy can only make faces and do what they say, same as the men have to do.\n \n Still, it was pretty exciting to press my nose against the slots in the wall and see the sliding panels that could come charging out and block the crossway into an airtight fit in case a meteor or something smashed into the ship. And all along there were glass cases with spacesuits standing in them, like those knights they used to have back in the Middle Ages.\n \n \"In the event of disaster affecting the oxygen content of companionway,\" they had the words etched into the glass, \"break glass with hammer upon wall, remove spacesuit and proceed to don it in the following fashion.\"\n \n I read the \"following fashion\" until I knew it by heart. Boy , I said to myself, I hope we have that kind of disaster. I'd sure like to get into one of those! Bet it would be more fun than those diving suits back in Undersea!\n \n \n And all the time I was alone. That was the best part.\n \n \n\n \n Then I passed Deck Twelve and there was a big sign. \"Notice! Passengers not permitted past this point!\" A big sign in red.\n \n I peeked around the corner. I knew it\u2014the next deck was the hull. I could see the portholes. Every twelve feet, they were, filled with the velvet of space and the dancing of more stars than I'd ever dreamed existed in the Universe.\n \n There wasn't anyone on the deck, as far as I could see. And this distance from the grav helix, the ship seemed mighty quiet and lonely. If I just took one quick look....\n \n But I thought of what Sis would say and I turned around obediently. Then I saw the big red sign again. \"Passengers not permitted\u2014\"\n \n Well! Didn't I know from my civics class that only women could be Earth Citizens these days? Sure, ever since the Male Desuffrage Act. And didn't I know that you had to be a citizen of a planet in order to get an interplanetary passport? Sis had explained it all to me in the careful, patient way she always talks politics and things like that to men.\n \n \"Technically, Ferdinand, I'm the only passenger in our family. You can't be one, because, not being a citizen, you can't acquire an Earth Passport. However, you'll be going to Venus on the strength of this clause\u2014'Miss Evelyn Sparling and all dependent male members of family, this number not to exceed the registered quota of sub-regulations pertaining'\u2014and so on. I want you to understand these matters, so that you will grow into a man who takes an active interest in world affairs. No matter what you hear, women really like and appreciate such men.\"\n \n Of course, I never pay much attention to Sis when she says such dumb things. I'm old enough, I guess, to know that it isn't what Women like and appreciate that counts when it comes to people getting married. If it were, Sis and three hundred other pretty girls like her wouldn't be on their way to Venus to hook husbands.\n \n Still, if I wasn't a passenger, the sign didn't have anything to do with me. I knew what Sis could say to that , but at least it was an argument I could use if it ever came up. So I broke the law.\n \n I was glad I did. The stars were exciting enough, but away off to the left, about five times as big as I'd ever seen it, except in the movies, was the Moon, a great blob of gray and white pockmarks holding off the black of space. I was hoping to see the Earth, but I figured it must be on the other side of the ship or behind us. I pressed my nose against the port and saw the tiny flicker of a spaceliner taking off, Marsbound. I wished I was on that one!\n \n Then I noticed, a little farther down the companionway, a stretch of blank wall where there should have been portholes. High up on the wall in glowing red letters were the words, \"Lifeboat 47. Passengers: Thirty-two. Crew: Eleven. Unauthorized personnel keep away!\"\n \n Another one of those signs.\n \n \n\n \n I crept up to the porthole nearest it and could just barely make out the stern jets where it was plastered against the hull. Then I walked under the sign and tried to figure the way you were supposed to get into it. There was a very thin line going around in a big circle that I knew must be the door. But I couldn't see any knobs or switches to open it with. Not even a button you could press.\n \n That meant it was a sonic lock like the kind we had on the outer keeps back home in Undersea. But knock or voice? I tried the two knock combinations I knew, and nothing happened. I only remembered one voice key\u2014might as well see if that's it, I figured.\n \n \"Twenty, Twenty-three. Open Sesame.\"\n \n For a second, I thought I'd hit it just right out of all the million possible combinations\u2014The door clicked inward toward a black hole, and a hairy hand as broad as my shoulders shot out of the hole. It closed around my throat and plucked me inside as if I'd been a baby sardine.\n \n I bounced once on the hard lifeboat floor. Before I got my breath and sat up, the door had been shut again. When the light came on, I found myself staring up the muzzle of a highly polished blaster and into the cold blue eyes of the biggest man I'd ever seen.\n \n \n\n \n He was wearing a one-piece suit made of some scaly green stuff that looked hard and soft at the same time.\n \n His boots were made of it too, and so was the hood hanging down his back.\n \n And his face was brown. Not just ordinary tan, you understand, but the deep, dark, burned-all-the-way-in brown I'd seen on the lifeguards in New Orleans whenever we took a surface vacation\u2014the kind of tan that comes from day after broiling day under a really hot Sun. His hair looked as if it had once been blond, but now there were just long combed-out waves with a yellowish tinge that boiled all the way down to his shoulders.\n \n I hadn't seen hair like that on a man except maybe in history books; every man I'd ever known had his hair cropped in the fashionable soup-bowl style. I was staring at his hair, almost forgetting about the blaster which I knew it was against the law for him to have at all, when I suddenly got scared right through.\n \n His eyes.\n \n They didn't blink and there seemed to be no expression around them. Just coldness. Maybe it was the kind of clothes he was wearing that did it, but all of a sudden I was reminded of a crocodile I'd seen in a surface zoo that had stared quietly at me for twenty minutes until it opened two long tooth-studded jaws.\n \n \"Green shatas!\" he said suddenly. \"Only a tadpole. I must be getting jumpy enough to splash.\"\n \n Then he shoved the blaster away in a holster made of the same scaly leather, crossed his arms on his chest and began to study me. I grunted to my feet, feeling a lot better. The coldness had gone out of his eyes.\n \n I held out my hand the way Sis had taught me. \"My name is Ferdinand Sparling. I'm very pleased to meet you, Mr.\u2014Mr.\u2014\"\n \n \"Hope for your sake,\" he said to me, \"that you aren't what you seem\u2014tadpole brother to one of them husbandless anura.\"\n \n \" What? \"\n \n \"A 'nuran is a female looking to nest. Anura is a herd of same. Come from Flatfolk ways.\"\n \n \"Flatfolk are the Venusian natives, aren't they? Are you a Venusian? What part of Venus do you come from? Why did you say you hope\u2014\"\n \n He chuckled and swung me up into one of the bunks that lined the lifeboat. \"Questions you ask,\" he said in his soft voice. \"Venus is a sharp enough place for a dryhorn, let alone a tadpole dryhorn with a boss-minded sister.\"\n \n \"I'm not a dryleg,\" I told him proudly. \" We're from Undersea.\"\n \n \" Dryhorn , I said, not dryleg. And what's Undersea?\"\n \n \"Well, in Undersea we called foreigners and newcomers drylegs. Just like on Venus, I guess, you call them dryhorns.\" And then I told him how Undersea had been built on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, when the mineral resources of the land began to give out and engineers figured that a lot could still be reached from the sea bottoms.\n \n \n\n \n He nodded. He'd heard about the sea-bottom mining cities that were bubbling under protective domes in every one of the Earth's oceans just about the same time settlements were springing up on the planets.\n \n He looked impressed when I told him about Mom and Pop being one of the first couples to get married in Undersea. He looked thoughtful when I told him how Sis and I had been born there and spent half our childhood listening to the pressure pumps. He raised his eyebrows and looked disgusted when I told how Mom, as Undersea representative on the World Council, had been one of the framers of the Male Desuffrage Act after the Third Atomic War had resulted in the Maternal Revolution.\n \n \n\n \n He almost squeezed my arm when I got to the time Mom and Pop were blown up in a surfacing boat.\n \n \"Well, after the funeral, there was a little money, so Sis decided we might as well use it to migrate. There was no future for her on Earth, she figured. You know, the three-out-of-four.\"\n \n \"How's that?\"\n \n \"The three-out-of-four. No more than three women out of every four on Earth can expect to find husbands. Not enough men to go around. Way back in the Twentieth Century, it began to be felt, Sis says, what with the wars and all. Then the wars went on and a lot more men began to die or get no good from the radioactivity. Then the best men went to the planets, Sis says, until by now even if a woman can scrounge a personal husband, he's not much to boast about.\"\n \n The stranger nodded violently. \"Not on Earth, he isn't. Those busybody anura make sure of that. What a place! Suffering gridniks, I had a bellyful!\"\n \n He told me about it. Women were scarce on Venus, and he hadn't been able to find any who were willing to come out to his lonely little islands; he had decided to go to Earth where there was supposed to be a surplus. Naturally, having been born and brought up on a very primitive planet, he didn't know \"it's a woman's world,\" like the older boys in school used to say.\n \n The moment he landed on Earth he was in trouble. He didn't know he had to register at a government-operated hotel for transient males; he threw a bartender through a thick plastic window for saying something nasty about the length of his hair; and imagine !\u2014he not only resisted arrest, resulting in three hospitalized policemen, but he sassed the judge in open court!\n \n \"Told me a man wasn't supposed to say anything except through female attorneys. Told her that where I came from, a man spoke his piece when he'd a mind to, and his woman walked by his side.\"\n \n \"What happened?\" I asked breathlessly.\n \n \"Oh, Guilty of This and Contempt of That. That blown-up brinosaur took my last munit for fines, then explained that she was remitting the rest because I was a foreigner and uneducated.\" His eyes grew dark for a moment. He chuckled again. \"But I wasn't going to serve all those fancy little prison sentences. Forcible Citizenship Indoctrination, they call it? Shook the dead-dry dust of the misbegotten, God forsaken mother world from my feet forever. The women on it deserve their men. My pockets were folded from the fines, and the paddlefeet were looking for me so close I didn't dare radio for more munit. So I stowed away.\"\n \n \n\n \n For a moment, I didn't understand him. When I did, I was almost ill.\n\"Y-you mean,\" I choked, \"th-that you're b-breaking the law right now? And I'm with you while you're doing it?\"\n \n He leaned over the edge of the bunk and stared at me very seriously.\n\"What breed of tadpole are they turning out these days? Besides, what business do you have this close to the hull?\"\n \n After a moment of sober reflection, I nodded. \"You're right. I've also become a male outside the law. We're in this together.\"\n \n He guffawed. Then he sat up and began cleaning his blaster. I found myself drawn to the bright killer-tube with exactly the fascination Sis insists such things have always had for men.\n \n \"Ferdinand your label? That's not right for a sprouting tadpole. I'll call you Ford. My name's Butt. Butt Lee Brown.\"\n \n I liked the sound of Ford. \"Is Butt a nickname, too?\"\n \n \"Yeah. Short for Alberta, but I haven't found a man who can draw a blaster fast enough to call me that. You see, Pop came over in the eighties\u2014the big wave of immigrants when they evacuated Ontario. Named all us boys after Canadian provinces. I was the youngest, so I got the name they were saving for a girl.\"\n \n \"You had a lot of brothers, Mr. Butt?\"\n \n He grinned with a mighty set of teeth. \"Oh, a nestful. Of course, they were all killed in the Blue Chicago Rising by the MacGregor boys\u2014all except me and Saskatchewan. Then Sas and me hunted the MacGregors down. Took a heap of time; we didn't float Jock MacGregor's ugly face down the Tuscany till both of us were pretty near grown up.\"\n \n I walked up close to where I could see the tiny bright copper coils of the blaster above the firing button. \"Have you killed a lot of men with that, Mr. Butt?\"\n \n \"Butt. Just plain Butt to you, Ford.\" He frowned and sighted at the light globe. \"No more'n twelve\u2014not counting five government paddlefeet, of course. I'm a peaceable planter. Way I figure it, violence never accomplishes much that's important. My brother Sas, now\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n He had just begun to work into a wonderful anecdote about his brother when the dinner gong rang. Butt told me to scat. He said I was a growing tadpole and needed my vitamins. And he mentioned, very off-hand, that he wouldn't at all object if I brought him some fresh fruit. It seemed there was nothing but processed foods in the lifeboat and Butt was used to a farmer's diet.\n \n Trouble was, he was a special kind of farmer. Ordinary fruit would have been pretty easy to sneak into my pockets at meals. I even found a way to handle the kelp and giant watercress Mr. Brown liked, but things like seaweed salt and Venusian mud-grapes just had too strong a smell. Twice, the mechanical hamper refused to accept my jacket for laundering and I had to wash it myself. But I learned so many wonderful things about Venus every time I visited that stowaway....\n \n I learned three wild-wave songs of the Flatfolk and what it is that the native Venusians hate so much; I learned how you tell the difference between a lousy government paddlefoot from New Kalamazoo and the slaptoe slinker who is the planter's friend. After a lot of begging, Butt Lee Brown explained the workings of his blaster, explained it so carefully that I could name every part and tell what it did from the tiny round electrodes to the long spirals of transformer. But no matter what, he would never let me hold it.\n \n \"Sorry, Ford, old tad,\" he would drawl, spinning around and around in the control swivel-chair at the nose of the lifeboat. \"But way I look at it, a man who lets somebody else handle his blaster is like the giant whose heart was in an egg that an enemy found. When you've grown enough so's your pop feels you ought to have a weapon, why, then's the time to learn it and you might's well learn fast. Before then, you're plain too young to be even near it.\"\n \n \"I don't have a father to give me one when I come of age. I don't even have an older brother as head of my family like your brother Labrador. All I have is Sis. And she \u2014\"\n \n \"She'll marry some fancy dryhorn who's never been farther South than the Polar Coast. And she'll stay head of the family, if I know her breed of green shata. Bossy, opinionated. By the way, Fordie,\" he said, rising and stretching so the fish-leather bounced and rippled off his biceps, \"that sister. She ever....\"\n \n And he'd be off again, cross-examining me about Evelyn. I sat in the swivel chair he'd vacated and tried to answer his questions. But there was a lot of stuff I didn't know. Evelyn was a healthy girl, for instance; how healthy, exactly, I had no way of finding out. Yes, I'd tell him, my aunts on both sides of my family each had had more than the average number of children. No, we'd never done any farming to speak of, back in Undersea, but\u2014yes, I'd guess Evelyn knew about as much as any girl there when it came to diving equipment and pressure pump regulation.\n \n How would I know that stuff would lead to trouble for me?\n \n \n\n \n Sis had insisted I come along to the geography lecture. Most of the other girls who were going to Venus for husbands talked to each other during the lecture, but not my sister! She hung on every word, took notes even, and asked enough questions to make the perspiring purser really work in those orientation periods.\n \n \"I am very sorry, Miss Sparling,\" he said with pretty heavy sarcasm,\n\"but I cannot remember any of the agricultural products of the Macro Continent. Since the human population is well below one per thousand square miles, it can readily be understood that the quantity of tilled soil, land or sub-surface, is so small that\u2014Wait, I remember something. The Macro Continent exports a fruit though not exactly an edible one. The wild dunging drug is harvested there by criminal speculators. Contrary to belief on Earth, the traffic has been growing in recent years. In fact\u2014\"\n \n \"Pardon me, sir,\" I broke in, \"but doesn't dunging come only from Leif Erickson Island off the Moscow Peninsula of the Macro Continent? You remember, purser\u2014Wang Li's third exploration, where he proved the island and the peninsula didn't meet for most of the year?\"\n \n The purser nodded slowly. \"I forgot,\" he admitted. \"Sorry, ladies, but the boy's right. Please make the correction in your notes.\"\n \n But Sis was the only one who took notes, and she didn't take that one. She stared at me for a moment, biting her lower lip thoughtfully, while I got sicker and sicker. Then she shut her pad with the final gesture of the right hand that Mom used to use just before challenging the opposition to come right down on the Council floor and debate it out with her.\n \n \"Ferdinand,\" Sis said, \"let's go back to our cabin.\"\n \n The moment she sat me down and walked slowly around me, I knew I was in for it. \"I've been reading up on Venusian geography in the ship's library,\" I told her in a hurry.\n \n \"No doubt,\" she said drily. She shook her night-black hair out. \"But you aren't going to tell me that you read about dunging in the ship's library. The books there have been censored by a government agent of Earth against the possibility that they might be read by susceptible young male minds like yours. She would not have allowed\u2014this Terran Agent\u2014\"\n \n \"Paddlefoot,\" I sneered.\n \n Sis sat down hard in our zoom-air chair. \"Now that's a term,\" she said carefully, \"that is used only by Venusian riffraff.\"\n \n \"They're not!\"\n \n \"Not what?\"\n \n \"Riffraff,\" I had to answer, knowing I was getting in deeper all the time and not being able to help it. I mustn't give Mr. Brown away!\n\"They're trappers and farmers, pioneers and explorers, who're building Venus. And it takes a real man to build on a hot, hungry hell like Venus.\"\n \n \"Does it, now?\" she said, looking at me as if I were beginning to grow a second pair of ears. \"Tell me more.\"\n \n \"You can't have meek, law-abiding, women-ruled men when you start civilization on a new planet. You've got to have men who aren't afraid to make their own law if necessary\u2014with their own guns. That's where law begins; the books get written up later.\"\n \n \"You're going to tell , Ferdinand, what evil, criminal male is speaking through your mouth!\"\n \n \"Nobody!\" I insisted. \"They're my own ideas!\"\n \n \"They are remarkably well-organized for a young boy's ideas. A boy who, I might add, has previously shown a ridiculous but nonetheless entirely masculine boredom with political philosophy. I plan to have a government career on that new planet you talk about, Ferdinand\u2014after I have found a good, steady husband, of course\u2014and I don't look forward to a masculinist radical in the family. Now, who has been filling your head with all this nonsense?\"\n \n \n\n \n I was sweating. Sis has that deadly bulldog approach when she feels someone is lying. I pulled my pulpast handkerchief from my pocket to wipe my face. Something rattled to the floor.\n \n \"What is this picture of me doing in your pocket, Ferdinand?\"\n \n A trap seemed to be hinging noisily into place. \"One of the passengers wanted to see how you looked in a bathing suit.\"\n \n \"The passengers on this ship are all female. I can't imagine any of them that curious about my appearance. Ferdinand, it's a man who has been giving you these anti-social ideas, isn't it? A war-mongering masculinist like all the frustrated men who want to engage in government and don't have the vaguest idea how to. Except, of course, in their ancient, bloody ways. Ferdinand, who has been perverting that sunny and carefree soul of yours?\"\n \n \"Nobody! Nobody! \"\n \n \"Ferdinand, there's no point in lying! I demand\u2014\"\n \n \"I told you, Sis. I told you! And don't call me Ferdinand. Call me Ford.\"\n \n \"Ford? Ford? Now, you listen to me, Ferdinand....\"\n \n After that it was all over but the confession. That came in a few moments. I couldn't fool Sis. She just knew me too well, I decided miserably. Besides, she was a girl.\n \n All the same, I wouldn't get Mr. Butt Lee Brown into trouble if I could help it. I made Sis promise she wouldn't turn him in if I took her to him. And the quick, nodding way she said she would made me feel just a little better.\n \n The door opened on the signal, \"Sesame.\" When Butt saw somebody was with me, he jumped and the ten-inch blaster barrel grew out of his fingers. Then he recognized Sis from the pictures.\n \n He stepped to one side and, with the same sweeping gesture, holstered his blaster and pushed his green hood off. It was Sis's turn to jump when she saw the wild mass of hair rolling down his back.\n \n \"An honor, Miss Sparling,\" he said in that rumbly voice. \"Please come right in. There's a hurry-up draft.\"\n \n So Sis went in and I followed right after her. Mr. Brown closed the door. I tried to catch his eye so I could give him some kind of hint or explanation, but he had taken a couple of his big strides and was in the control section with Sis. She didn't give ground, though; I'll say that for her. She only came to his chest, but she had her arms crossed sternly.\n \n \"First, Mr. Brown,\" she began, like talking to a cluck of a kid in class, \"you realize that you are not only committing the political crime of traveling without a visa, and the criminal one of stowing away without paying your fare, but the moral delinquency of consuming stores intended for the personnel of this ship solely in emergency?\"\n \n \n\n \n He opened his mouth to its maximum width and raised an enormous hand. Then he let the air out and dropped his arm.\n \n \"I take it you either have no defense or care to make none,\" Sis added caustically.\n \n Butt laughed slowly and carefully as if he were going over each word.\n\"Wonder if all the anura talk like that. And you want to foul up Venus.\"\n \n \"We haven't done so badly on Earth, after the mess you men made of politics. It needed a revolution of the mothers before\u2014\"\n \n \"Needed nothing. Everyone wanted peace. Earth is a weary old world.\"\n \n \"It's a world of strong moral fiber compared to yours, Mr. Alberta Lee Brown.\" Hearing his rightful name made him move suddenly and tower over her. Sis said with a certain amount of hurry and change of tone, \"What do you have to say about stowing away and using up lifeboat stores?\"\n \n \n\n \n He cocked his head and considered a moment. \"Look,\" he said finally,\n\"I have more than enough munit to pay for round trip tickets, but I couldn't get a return visa because of that brinosaur judge and all the charges she hung on me. Had to stow away. Picked the Eleanor Roosevelt because a couple of the boys in the crew are friends of mine and they were willing to help. But this lifeboat\u2014don't you know that every passenger ship carries four times as many lifeboats as it needs? Not to mention the food I didn't eat because it stuck in my throat?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" she said bitterly. \"You had this boy steal fresh fruit for you. I suppose you didn't know that under space regulations that makes him equally guilty?\"\n \n \"No, Sis, he didn't,\" I was beginning to argue. \"All he wanted\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure I knew. Also know that if I'm picked up as a stowaway, I'll be sent back to Earth to serve out those fancy little sentences.\"\n \n \"Well, you're guilty of them, aren't you?\"\n \n He waved his hands at her impatiently. \"I'm not talking law, female; I'm talking sense. Listen! I'm in trouble because I went to Earth to look for a wife. You're standing here right now because you're on your way to Venus for a husband. So let's.\"\n \n Sis actually staggered back. \"Let's? Let's what ? Are\u2014are you daring to suggest that\u2014that\u2014\"\n \n \"Now, Miss Sparling, no hoopla. I'm saying let's get married, and you know it. You figured out from what the boy told you that I was chewing on you for a wife. You're healthy and strong, got good heredity, you know how to operate sub-surface machinery, you've lived underwater, and your disposition's no worse than most of the anura I've seen. Prolific stock, too.\"\n \n I was so excited I just had to yell: \"Gee, Sis, say yes !\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28164, "query_start_index": 28166, "query_end_index": 28206, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ferdinand Sparling is a passenger aboard that spaceship Eleanor Roosavelt. He lives in a future society in which only women are citizens of Earth, and he is traveling to Venus with his sister Evelyn where she is in search of a husband. Women are seen as intellectuals and the only ones fit to work in positions like the government. As everyone sleeps just after the ship has taken off, Ferdinand decides to explore the ship. He comes to the hull of the ship, the crew are still asleep. In the hull are multiple doors leading to lifeboats. Ferdinand manages to open one of them, and is pulled into the lifeboat by a huge, intimidating looking man. He relates to Ferdinand how he is from Venus and had traveled to Earth to find a wife. Once he got to Earth, he realised that the planet was run by women, and when he didn't realise he has to book into a government run hotel for transient males, assaulted a barman and resisted arrest and was held for contempt in court, he decided to escape back to Venus as a stowaway. When Ferdinand attends a geography lecture with his sister, and reveals the knowledge that he has acquired from spending his days with the Venusian Butt Lee Brown, his sister becomes suspicious. He eventually gets the information that he has been spending time with a stowaway out of him. He takes her to see Butt, where she interrogates him. He tells her how he has enough money for a ticket, but doesn't want to get caught and face charges back on Earth. He tells her how he has admired her from the stories that Ferdinand has told of her, and asks her to marry him. THE END. "}
{"id": "49897_3", "pid": "49897_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Business\n \n \n By JAMES E. GUNN\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he\u2014and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\n \n\n \n The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.\n \n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.\n \n As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n \n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n \n Then all was quiet\u2014outside.\n \n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.\n \n \"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\n \n \n\n \n Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it, Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.\"\n \n Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium\u2014'\"\n \n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n \n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n \n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful.\"\n \n Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.\n \n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n \n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n \n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"\n \n \"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure he did the best he could.\"\n \n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n\"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago.\"\n \n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work to do.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"\n \n \"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth share.\"\n \n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money bought it?\"\n \n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n \n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n \n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n \n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that? Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n \n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"\n \n Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n \n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is to\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted indignantly.\n \n \n\n \n Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.\n \n \"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora\u2014it has fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n \n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n \n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n \n \"What about macro-organisms\u2014\" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n\"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n \n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"\n \n \"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit.\"\n \n \"Quit!\"\n \n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver\u2014it won't budge!\"\n \n \n\n \n The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep? Fweep?\"\n \n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n \n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. \"Get it out!\"\n \n Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a\u2014a blob!\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n \n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n \n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me\u2014well!\" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.\n \n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.\n \n \"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep\u2014I mean sweep.\"\n \n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n \n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\" he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve.\"\n \n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n \n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n \n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!\"\n \n \"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n \n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n \n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"\n \n \"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?\"\n \n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n \n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n \n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.\n \n Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\" he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.\n \n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n \n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit\u2014\"\n \n \"Did you ever work on Niccol\u00f2 Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"\n \n Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries\u2014\"\n \n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n \n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.\n \n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.\n \n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\n \n \n\n \n As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on.\"\n \n The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n \n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n \n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n \n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!\"\n \n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n\"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n \n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n \n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.\n \n Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is as good as anybody's.\"\n \n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver\u2014and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She glared venomously at Grampa.\n \n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n \n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n \n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"\n \n \"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here\u2014involuntary colonists.\"\n \n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n \n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize.\"\n \n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were any good.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.\n \n Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it.\"\n \n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n \n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.\n \n Grampa snorted. \"Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to.\"\n \n \"Then it goes deeper,\" Junior insisted. \"It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?\"\n \n Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. \"Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n \n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\n \n \n\n \n He cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses.\"\n \n The faces were still blank and unillumined.\n \n \"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n \n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me\u2014I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'\"\n \n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n\"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible.\"\n \n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it.\"\n \n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.\n \n \"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it.\"\n \n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded ironically.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call\u2014\"\n \n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"\n \n \"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver\u2014even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want.\"\n \n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n\"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me.\"\n \n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it happened.\"\n \n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n \n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.\n \n \"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n \n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n \n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n \n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n \n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n \n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate its center of gravity.\"\n \n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n \n \"It shifts.\"\n \n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n \n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.\n \n \"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n \n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following me.\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n \n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n \n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out, Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and\u2014\"\n \n \"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.\n \n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n \n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n \n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n \n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n \n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n \n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"\n \n Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n \n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said unbelievingly.\n \n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his\u2014whatever it is he uses for skin\u2014is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead.\"\n \n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"\n \n \"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the thought.\n \n \n\n \n Joyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n \n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him\u2014conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move.\"\n \n \"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n \n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n \n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?\"\n \n \"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet.\"\n \n \"Well?\"\n \n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n \n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n \n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures.\"\n \n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\"\n \n \"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\" Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\n \n \n\n \n Reba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway.\"\n \n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !\"\n \n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!\"\n \n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.\n \n Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n \n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n \n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n \n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.\n \n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n\"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"\n \n \"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed\u2014long enough to keep us from being squashed\u2014and then quit.\"\n \n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n\"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n \n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n \n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n \n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?\"\n \n \"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n \n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n \n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised\u2014\"\n \n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to it, I mean?\"\n \n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n \n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n \n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"\n \n At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n\"Fwiend,\" it said.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n \n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"\n \n \"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.\n \n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n \n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work.\"\n \n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug\u2014\"\n \n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"\n \n \"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n \n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n \n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on.\"\n \n \"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.\n \n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave\u2014if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.\n \n \"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points.\"\n \n \"That may be,\" Junior said stubbornly, \"but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing.\"\n \n \"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep,\" Reba said, her voice soft. \"No, here they come now.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Fweep, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30210, "query_start_index": 30212, "query_end_index": 30278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fweep is significant because he is the only creature living on Fweepland. He is a blob-shaped, raspberry-colored, gelatinous, transparent creature who sweeps up the debris that he runs over and engulfs it in his body. After he sweeps up particles, the outer inch or two of his body turns cloudy, then slowly clears. It seems he also absorbs substances from human contact since he follows a crooked path and hiccups after Grampa, who has been imbibing, pats him. He has a pseudo-mouth and makes the sound, or says the word, \u201cFweep.\u201d His skin is impervious, and he has no enzymes or nervous system, so rat poison has no effect on him. Fweep immediately befriends Four. \n\tWhen Four explores Fweepland to identify its center of gravity, he discovers that it shifts because Fweep is a circular polarizer. Fweep is what makes the planet so heavy and prevents the flivver\u2019s gravity polarizer from working so the family can leave. Fweep is slightly radioactive and likely immortal and incapable of reproduction since there is no need to reproduce. Because he has circular polarization, linear polarization is uncomfortable to him, so Fweep turned of the flivver\u2019s gravity polarizer just before they landed. Fweep wants to be helpful, but he doesn\u2019t want Four to leave since Four is the only friend he has ever had. Fweep was lonely before he met Four. Fweep will let the Peppergrass family leave only if Four stays with him. Fweep is responsible for the family\u2019s landing on Fweepland and their predicament of being unable to leave.\n"}
{"id": "49897_3", "pid": "49897_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Business\n \n \n By JAMES E. GUNN\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he\u2014and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\n \n\n \n The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.\n \n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.\n \n As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n \n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n \n Then all was quiet\u2014outside.\n \n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.\n \n \"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\n \n \n\n \n Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it, Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.\"\n \n Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium\u2014'\"\n \n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n \n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n \n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful.\"\n \n Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.\n \n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n \n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n \n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"\n \n \"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure he did the best he could.\"\n \n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n\"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago.\"\n \n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work to do.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"\n \n \"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth share.\"\n \n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money bought it?\"\n \n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n \n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n \n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n \n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that? Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n \n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"\n \n Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n \n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is to\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted indignantly.\n \n \n\n \n Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.\n \n \"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora\u2014it has fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n \n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n \n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n \n \"What about macro-organisms\u2014\" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n\"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n \n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"\n \n \"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit.\"\n \n \"Quit!\"\n \n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver\u2014it won't budge!\"\n \n \n\n \n The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep? Fweep?\"\n \n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n \n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. \"Get it out!\"\n \n Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a\u2014a blob!\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n \n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n \n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me\u2014well!\" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.\n \n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.\n \n \"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep\u2014I mean sweep.\"\n \n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n \n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\" he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve.\"\n \n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n \n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n \n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!\"\n \n \"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n \n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n \n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"\n \n \"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?\"\n \n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n \n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n \n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.\n \n Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\" he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.\n \n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n \n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit\u2014\"\n \n \"Did you ever work on Niccol\u00f2 Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"\n \n Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries\u2014\"\n \n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n \n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.\n \n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.\n \n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\n \n \n\n \n As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on.\"\n \n The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n \n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n \n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n \n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!\"\n \n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n\"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n \n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n \n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.\n \n Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is as good as anybody's.\"\n \n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver\u2014and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She glared venomously at Grampa.\n \n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n \n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n \n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"\n \n \"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here\u2014involuntary colonists.\"\n \n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n \n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize.\"\n \n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were any good.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.\n \n Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it.\"\n \n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n \n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.\n \n Grampa snorted. \"Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to.\"\n \n \"Then it goes deeper,\" Junior insisted. \"It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?\"\n \n Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. \"Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n \n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\n \n \n\n \n He cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses.\"\n \n The faces were still blank and unillumined.\n \n \"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n \n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me\u2014I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'\"\n \n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n\"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible.\"\n \n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it.\"\n \n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.\n \n \"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it.\"\n \n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded ironically.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call\u2014\"\n \n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"\n \n \"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver\u2014even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want.\"\n \n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n\"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me.\"\n \n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it happened.\"\n \n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n \n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.\n \n \"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n \n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n \n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n \n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n \n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n \n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate its center of gravity.\"\n \n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n \n \"It shifts.\"\n \n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n \n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.\n \n \"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n \n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following me.\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n \n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n \n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out, Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and\u2014\"\n \n \"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.\n \n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n \n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n \n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n \n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n \n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n \n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"\n \n Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n \n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said unbelievingly.\n \n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his\u2014whatever it is he uses for skin\u2014is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead.\"\n \n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"\n \n \"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the thought.\n \n \n\n \n Joyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n \n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him\u2014conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move.\"\n \n \"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n \n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n \n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?\"\n \n \"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet.\"\n \n \"Well?\"\n \n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n \n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n \n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures.\"\n \n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\"\n \n \"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\" Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\n \n \n\n \n Reba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway.\"\n \n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !\"\n \n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!\"\n \n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.\n \n Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n \n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n \n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n \n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.\n \n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n\"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"\n \n \"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed\u2014long enough to keep us from being squashed\u2014and then quit.\"\n \n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n\"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n \n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n \n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n \n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?\"\n \n \"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n \n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n \n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised\u2014\"\n \n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to it, I mean?\"\n \n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n \n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n \n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"\n \n At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n\"Fwiend,\" it said.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n \n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"\n \n \"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.\n \n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n \n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work.\"\n \n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug\u2014\"\n \n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"\n \n \"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n \n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n \n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on.\"\n \n \"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.\n \n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave\u2014if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.\n \n \"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points.\"\n \n \"That may be,\" Junior said stubbornly, \"but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing.\"\n \n \"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep,\" Reba said, her voice soft. \"No, here they come now.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Fweep, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30210, "query_start_index": 30212, "query_end_index": 30278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fweep is a creature that Four finds when the Peppergrass family lands on an unknown planet. He is a gelatin-like orb about two feet in diameter that is raspberry in color, and has something resembling a mouth. However, he has an interesting ability in which he picks up particulates on the ground by rolling around. He calls this sweeping, and we find out later in the story that he is able to convert the materials in what he picks up to create radioactive matter. Because of this ability, he has a very high mass which the Peppergrass family misinterpreted as heavy metals as they were scanning the planet, which is what drew them to the planet in the first place. Fweep is also responsible for the ship's crashing: because of his mass, Fweep is a circular polarizer, which conflicted with the linear polarizer of the spaceship. Fweep and Four become instant friends when they meet, which adds another layer of complication to the relationship that the family has with Fweep. He could let the family return home, which they can't do under his gravitational pull, but Fweep does not want to let the family go if that means that Four would leave him, and Four is his only friend. This presents a moral conundrum to the family: they could return if they leave Four on the planet, but they do not want to leave a family member behind. "}
{"id": "49897_3", "pid": "49897_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Business\n \n \n By JAMES E. GUNN\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he\u2014and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\n \n\n \n The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.\n \n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.\n \n As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n \n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n \n Then all was quiet\u2014outside.\n \n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.\n \n \"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\n \n \n\n \n Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it, Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.\"\n \n Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium\u2014'\"\n \n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n \n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n \n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful.\"\n \n Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.\n \n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n \n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n \n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"\n \n \"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure he did the best he could.\"\n \n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n\"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago.\"\n \n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work to do.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"\n \n \"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth share.\"\n \n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money bought it?\"\n \n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n \n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n \n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n \n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that? Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n \n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"\n \n Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n \n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is to\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted indignantly.\n \n \n\n \n Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.\n \n \"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora\u2014it has fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n \n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n \n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n \n \"What about macro-organisms\u2014\" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n\"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n \n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"\n \n \"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit.\"\n \n \"Quit!\"\n \n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver\u2014it won't budge!\"\n \n \n\n \n The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep? Fweep?\"\n \n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n \n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. \"Get it out!\"\n \n Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a\u2014a blob!\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n \n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n \n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me\u2014well!\" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.\n \n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.\n \n \"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep\u2014I mean sweep.\"\n \n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n \n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\" he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve.\"\n \n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n \n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n \n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!\"\n \n \"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n \n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n \n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"\n \n \"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?\"\n \n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n \n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n \n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.\n \n Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\" he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.\n \n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n \n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit\u2014\"\n \n \"Did you ever work on Niccol\u00f2 Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"\n \n Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries\u2014\"\n \n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n \n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.\n \n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.\n \n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\n \n \n\n \n As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on.\"\n \n The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n \n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n \n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n \n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!\"\n \n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n\"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n \n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n \n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.\n \n Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is as good as anybody's.\"\n \n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver\u2014and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She glared venomously at Grampa.\n \n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n \n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n \n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"\n \n \"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here\u2014involuntary colonists.\"\n \n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n \n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize.\"\n \n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were any good.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.\n \n Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it.\"\n \n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n \n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.\n \n Grampa snorted. \"Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to.\"\n \n \"Then it goes deeper,\" Junior insisted. \"It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?\"\n \n Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. \"Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n \n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\n \n \n\n \n He cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses.\"\n \n The faces were still blank and unillumined.\n \n \"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n \n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me\u2014I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'\"\n \n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n\"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible.\"\n \n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it.\"\n \n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.\n \n \"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it.\"\n \n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded ironically.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call\u2014\"\n \n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"\n \n \"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver\u2014even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want.\"\n \n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n\"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me.\"\n \n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it happened.\"\n \n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n \n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.\n \n \"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n \n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n \n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n \n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n \n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n \n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate its center of gravity.\"\n \n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n \n \"It shifts.\"\n \n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n \n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.\n \n \"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n \n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following me.\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n \n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n \n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out, Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and\u2014\"\n \n \"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.\n \n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n \n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n \n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n \n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n \n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n \n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"\n \n Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n \n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said unbelievingly.\n \n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his\u2014whatever it is he uses for skin\u2014is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead.\"\n \n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"\n \n \"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the thought.\n \n \n\n \n Joyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n \n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him\u2014conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move.\"\n \n \"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n \n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n \n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?\"\n \n \"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet.\"\n \n \"Well?\"\n \n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n \n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n \n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures.\"\n \n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\"\n \n \"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\" Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\n \n \n\n \n Reba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway.\"\n \n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !\"\n \n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!\"\n \n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.\n \n Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n \n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n \n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n \n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.\n \n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n\"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"\n \n \"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed\u2014long enough to keep us from being squashed\u2014and then quit.\"\n \n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n\"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n \n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n \n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n \n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?\"\n \n \"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n \n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n \n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised\u2014\"\n \n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to it, I mean?\"\n \n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n \n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n \n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"\n \n At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n\"Fwiend,\" it said.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n \n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"\n \n \"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.\n \n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n \n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work.\"\n \n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug\u2014\"\n \n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"\n \n \"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n \n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n \n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on.\"\n \n \"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.\n \n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave\u2014if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.\n \n \"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points.\"\n \n \"That may be,\" Junior said stubbornly, \"but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing.\"\n \n \"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep,\" Reba said, her voice soft. \"No, here they come now.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Fweep, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30210, "query_start_index": 30212, "query_end_index": 30278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fweep is a pink colored blob, and he\u2019s about two-feet wide. He looks like gelatin, and he picks up dust and particles as he moves across the floor of the flivver. The outer couple of inches of his body become cloudy when he does this, and then they clear again. Fweep gets his name because when Four first meets him and brings him back to the flivver, the only word he says is \u201cFweep?\u201d He is trying to ask Four if he should sweep the spaceship. He wants to be helpful because he has no other friends or family members on his planet. \n\nThe family has a difficult time figuring out why their ship\u2019s polarizer won\u2019t work, and Fweep ends up being the culprit. Fweep is a circular polarizer, and he is the reason that the planet is so heavy. He is a being entirely different than anything living on Earth. Four believes he is immortal because he appears to be the only one of his kind. As far as they know, he cannot be killed because he has zero enzymes, no nervous system, his skin is impenetrable, and he doesn\u2019t breathe. Junior uses a special tool to test Fweep\u2019s radioactivity levels, and he finds that the creature is radioactive, although it\u2019s unclear how or why. \n\nWhen the family\u2019s flivver lands, Fweep does not like the feeling of linear polarization, so he neutralizes it. This causes the spaceship to abruptly fall to the ground. After he meets Four, the eight-year-old genius of the family, he decides that he wants to be his friend. Four asks Fweep if his family can leave the planet, and Fweep tells him he doesn\u2019t want his friend to leave. He enjoys sitting in Four\u2019s lap and even learns the word \u201cfwend.\u201d Fweep won\u2019t allow the flivver\u2019s polarizer to work, so the family cannot leave. He won\u2019t allow the polarizer to work because he wants to stay friends with Four. When the story abruptly comes to an end, the Peppergrass adults are trying to figure out how to solve this problem. \n"}
{"id": "49897_3", "pid": "49897_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Business\n \n \n By JAMES E. GUNN\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he\u2014and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\n \n\n \n The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.\n \n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.\n \n As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n \n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n \n Then all was quiet\u2014outside.\n \n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.\n \n \"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\n \n \n\n \n Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it, Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.\"\n \n Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium\u2014'\"\n \n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n \n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n \n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful.\"\n \n Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.\n \n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n \n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n \n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"\n \n \"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure he did the best he could.\"\n \n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n\"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago.\"\n \n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work to do.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"\n \n \"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth share.\"\n \n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money bought it?\"\n \n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n \n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n \n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n \n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that? Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n \n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"\n \n Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n \n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is to\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted indignantly.\n \n \n\n \n Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.\n \n \"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora\u2014it has fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n \n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n \n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n \n \"What about macro-organisms\u2014\" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n\"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n \n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"\n \n \"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit.\"\n \n \"Quit!\"\n \n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver\u2014it won't budge!\"\n \n \n\n \n The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep? Fweep?\"\n \n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n \n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. \"Get it out!\"\n \n Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a\u2014a blob!\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n \n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n \n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me\u2014well!\" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.\n \n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.\n \n \"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep\u2014I mean sweep.\"\n \n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n \n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\" he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve.\"\n \n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n \n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n \n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!\"\n \n \"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n \n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n \n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"\n \n \"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?\"\n \n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n \n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n \n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.\n \n Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\" he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.\n \n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n \n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit\u2014\"\n \n \"Did you ever work on Niccol\u00f2 Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"\n \n Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries\u2014\"\n \n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n \n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.\n \n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.\n \n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\n \n \n\n \n As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on.\"\n \n The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n \n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n \n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n \n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!\"\n \n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n\"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n \n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n \n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.\n \n Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is as good as anybody's.\"\n \n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver\u2014and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She glared venomously at Grampa.\n \n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n \n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n \n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"\n \n \"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here\u2014involuntary colonists.\"\n \n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n \n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize.\"\n \n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were any good.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.\n \n Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it.\"\n \n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n \n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.\n \n Grampa snorted. \"Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to.\"\n \n \"Then it goes deeper,\" Junior insisted. \"It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?\"\n \n Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. \"Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n \n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\n \n \n\n \n He cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses.\"\n \n The faces were still blank and unillumined.\n \n \"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n \n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me\u2014I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'\"\n \n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n\"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible.\"\n \n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it.\"\n \n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.\n \n \"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it.\"\n \n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded ironically.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call\u2014\"\n \n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"\n \n \"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver\u2014even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want.\"\n \n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n\"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me.\"\n \n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it happened.\"\n \n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n \n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.\n \n \"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n \n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n \n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n \n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n \n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n \n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate its center of gravity.\"\n \n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n \n \"It shifts.\"\n \n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n \n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.\n \n \"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n \n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following me.\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n \n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n \n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out, Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and\u2014\"\n \n \"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.\n \n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n \n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n \n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n \n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n \n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n \n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"\n \n Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n \n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said unbelievingly.\n \n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his\u2014whatever it is he uses for skin\u2014is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead.\"\n \n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"\n \n \"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the thought.\n \n \n\n \n Joyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n \n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him\u2014conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move.\"\n \n \"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n \n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n \n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?\"\n \n \"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet.\"\n \n \"Well?\"\n \n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n \n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n \n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures.\"\n \n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\"\n \n \"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\" Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\n \n \n\n \n Reba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway.\"\n \n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !\"\n \n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!\"\n \n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.\n \n Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n \n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n \n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n \n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.\n \n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n\"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"\n \n \"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed\u2014long enough to keep us from being squashed\u2014and then quit.\"\n \n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n\"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n \n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n \n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n \n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?\"\n \n \"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n \n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n \n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised\u2014\"\n \n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to it, I mean?\"\n \n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n \n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n \n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"\n \n At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n\"Fwiend,\" it said.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n \n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"\n \n \"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.\n \n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n \n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work.\"\n \n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug\u2014\"\n \n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"\n \n \"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n \n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n \n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on.\"\n \n \"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.\n \n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave\u2014if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.\n \n \"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points.\"\n \n \"That may be,\" Junior said stubbornly, \"but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing.\"\n \n \"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep,\" Reba said, her voice soft. \"No, here they come now.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Fweep, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30210, "query_start_index": 30212, "query_end_index": 30278, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Fweep is a gelatinous life-form, unlike anything the Peppergrass family has ever seen before. Fweep is slightly radioactive after having absorbed much of the radioactive substances found on this planet. He can also convert ordinary matter into a radioactive substance. Fweep is unstable, unshootable, and unable to be poisoned. Fweep does not breathe, so he is unable to be suffocated or drowned. As well, Fweep may be immortal, since there are no other of his kind. Since he\u2019s the only one of his kind, he\u2019s very lonely and latches onto Four as soon as he arrives. Fweep controls the gravity of Fweepland, and uses circular gravity not linear gravity. His powers are extraordinary and completely unknown. "}
{"id": "50818_1", "pid": "50818_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\n \n \n By JIM HARMON\n \n Illustrated by WEST\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Every lonely man tries to make friends. Manet just didn't know when to stop!\n \n \n \n William Manet was alone.\n \n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.\n \n He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and think more like a god than any man for generations.\n \n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n \n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n \n Lately she was winking back at him.\n \n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.\n \n No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet could only be this lonely on Mars.\n \n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n \n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat, flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was needed here\u2014no human being, at least.\n \n The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.\n \n They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet and his fellows.\n \n The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.\n \n But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered wonderful opportunities.\n \n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as bright as envy.\n \n \n\n \n Manet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia. Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest, making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a kind of climaxing release of terror.\n \n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.\n \n He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n \n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n \n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n \n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm fine .\" He let the word hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what place this is?\"\n \n The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n \n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n \n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's me exactly. Trader Tom Service\u2014Serving the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the planets.\"\n \n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey, immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.\n \n \"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a government service. I represent free enterprise.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n \n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known. Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper. They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things they can forego the papers. Comprehend, mon ami ? My businessmen have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"\n \n \"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this glass of whiskey.\"\n \n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n \n \"Very good.\"\n \n \"Excellent?\"\n \n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n \n \"I only meant\u2014but never mind. We give you what you want. As for paying for it\u2014why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a Trader Tom Credit Card.\"\n \n \"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n\"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n \n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You never pay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your estate .\"\n \n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n \n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n \n \"Whatever you want?\"\n \n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n \n \"You know.\"\n \n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"\n \n \"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only sell . I am a trader\u2014Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Folk legend!\"\n \n \"On the contrary, mon cher , the only reality it lacks is political reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n \n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual, you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so much.\"\n \n Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\n \n \n\n \n When he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was pushing it across the floor towards him.\n \n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't wood\u2014only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\n \n \n LIFO\n   The Socialization Kit\n \n \n \"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n\"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic, aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer\u2014but that is reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n \n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the charges.\"\n \n \"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the Trader Tom plan.\"\n \n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n \n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any complaints yet.\"\n \n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n \n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n \n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.\n \n Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk, suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n \n So he went to open the box.\n \n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n \n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.\n \n On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the Reader's Digest , covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in black on the spine and cover: The Making of Friends .\n \n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title in larger print and slightly amplified: The Making of Friends and Others . There was no author listed. A further line of information stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD., SYRACUSE.\n \n The unnumbered first chapter was headed Your First Friend .\n \n Before you go further, first find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital .\n \n He quickly riffled through the pages. Other Friends, Authority, A Companion .... Then The Final Model . Manet tried to flip past this section, but the pages after the sheet labeled The Final Model were stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n \n Manet flipped back to page one.\n \n First find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital to your entire experiment in socialization. The Modifier is Part #A-1 on the Master Chart.\n \n He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits. Maybe even the Modifier itself.\n \n He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand.\n \n The toe bone was connected to the foot bone....\n \n \n\n \n The Red King sat smugly in his diagonal corner.\n \n The Black King stood two places away, his top half tipsy in frustration.\n \n The Red King crabbed sideways one square.\n \n The Black King pounced forward one space.\n \n The Red King advanced backwards to face the enemy.\n \n The Black King shuffled sideways.\n \n The Red King followed....\n \n Uselessly.\n \n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n \n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n \n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n \n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him. Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n \n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said pontifically.\n \n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him.\n \n Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress. Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n \n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts, that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n \n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines, the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing, ad nauseum . What a narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal human being?\n \n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.\n \n Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties\u2014Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson, Sam Merwin tennis stories, Saturday Evening Post covers\u2014when he had first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm opinions on all these.\n \n He yearned for someone to challenge him\u2014to say that Dime Sports had been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why, Sewanee Review , there had been a magazine for you.\n \n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n \n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n \n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.\n \n Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n \n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n \n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the diesel works, closed again.\n \n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n \n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of Ronald's jaw.\n \n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n \n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n\"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n \n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n \n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"\n \n Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n \n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n \n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n \n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that their checker games always ended in a tie?\n \n \n\n \n The calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n \n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n \n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent wall.\n \n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.\n \n And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n \n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles and patchy sunburn.\n \n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward Communication.\n \n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on the walls of the tubeway.\n \n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n \n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n \n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.\n \n In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback of the transmission.\n \n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C. It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York swing.\n \n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present schedule\u2014\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word\u2014\"for atmosphere seeding.\n \n \"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources of two hundred and seventy-four years is not an official government estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to believe our original estimate was substantially correct. The total time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n \n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n \n He sat there thinking about eighteen years.\n \n He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns.\n \n Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out. There was a lot left inside.\n \n One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one of them, he now knew, was the Modifier.\n \n The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off.\n \n If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head. Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to nothing whatsoever.\n \n Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n \n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types. Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain compensations.\n \n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed: The Making of a Girl .\n \n \n\n \n Veronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n \n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his life.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"\n \n She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n \n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n \n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather bristly, masculine countenance.\n \n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n \n She made her return.\n \n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n \n \"Whenever you say.\"\n \n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment. There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n \n \"Now?\" she asked.\n \n \"I'll tell you.\"\n \n \"If you were a jet pilot,\" Veronica said wistfully, \"you would be romantic. You would grab love when you could. You would never know which moment would be last. You would make the most of each one.\"\n \n \"I'm not a jet pilot,\" Manet said. \"There are no jet pilots. There haven't been any for generations.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Veronica said. \"Who else would stop those vile North Koreans and Red China 'volunteers'?\"\n \n \"Veronica,\" he said carefully, \"the Korean War is over. It was finished even before the last of the jet pilots.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" she snapped. \"If it were over, I'd know about it, wouldn't I?\"\n \n She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright, less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald. Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n \n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n \n \"Oh, yes.\"\n \n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n \n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n \n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight in you at all?\"\n \n He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n \n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n \n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\n \n \n\n \n Ronald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the corridor.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n \n \"No, darling.\"\n \n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore the noise. She was still following orders.\n \n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried through sepulchrally.\n \n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n \n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.\n \n A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n \n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the station.\n \n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n \n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n \n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n \n But he looked offended.\n \n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n\"inside, inside.\"\n \n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.\n \n \"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year, forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n \n \"If you think it's the right thing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n \n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n \n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n \n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he walked too carefully for this to happen.\n \n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion, William, you should let us out.\"\n \n \"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill, dearest.\"\n \n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n \n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n \n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\n \n \n\n \n Pouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the box to go around.\n \n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n \n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.\n \n He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n \n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n \n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n \n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n \n He glanced forward and found the headings: The Final Model .\n \n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he could.\n \n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and under his fingers....\n \n Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n \n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n \n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n \n \"Move!\"\n \n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the flesh-sprayers.\n \n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n \n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n \n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n \n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should understand. I am different from the others.\"\n \n \"They all say that.\"\n \n \"I am not your friend.\"\n \n \"No?\"\n \n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n \n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure at the symmetry of the situation.\n \n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have all your knowledge. You do not have all your knowledge. If you let yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n \n \"When do you start?\"\n \n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n \n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.\n \n \"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man. I've seen that you will always keep your friends. \"\n \n \n\n \n The prospect was frightful.\n \n Victor smiled. \"Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?\"\n \n \"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you are through? You have fulfilled your function?\"\n \n \"Yes. Yes.\"\n \n \"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see me suffer?\"\n \n \" Yes. \"\n \n \"No. Can't do it, old man. Can't. I know. You're too human, too like me. The one thing a man can't accept is a passive state, a state of uselessness. Not if he can possibly avoid it. Something has to be happening to him. He has to be happening to something. You didn't kill me because then you would have nothing left to do. You'll never kill me.\"\n \n \"Of course not!\" Victor stormed. \"Fundamental safety cut-off!\"\n \n \"Rationalization. You don't want to kill me. And you can't stop challenging me at every turn. That's your function.\"\n \n \"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n \n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a friend!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29872, "query_start_index": 29874, "query_end_index": 29914, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "William Manet is working in atmosphere seeder station 131-47 on Mars. He is completely alone, but doesn't fear loneliness, he welcomes it, and the idea that it might drive him mad one day. His job is to wait, looking out at the expanse of nothingness around him. He is an overseer, to prepare the atmosphere for colonization. One day, Manet thinks he sees a spaceship land near his station. He puts on his pressure suit and heads out to see what it is. As he walks towards it, he finds himself in a rustic log cabin, where a lean, tall man stands, waiting for him. The man calls himself \"Trader Tom\", and offers him a very interesting service. He tells Manet that he will give him a special credit card that will allow him to purchase anything he can think of. Manet's estate would cover the cost, and when Manet asks the man what would happen if he had no estate, Trader Tom simply says that this is a risk that he, and his business, take. Trader Tom asks what would Manet like, to which he replies: to not be alone. Manet signs some paperwork and is given the credit card. \nManet is given a box, it is called \"LIFO, the socialisation kit\". The box contains various items from a person's lifetime. On top is a book entitled \"The Making Of Friends and Others''. It orders the user to find the modifier, which Manet cannot locate. He goes to work anyway, on making his first friend with the tools inside the kit. \nHis first friend he creates is named Ronald. He seems sweet at first but his incessant optimism and lack of intelligence finally becomes too much for Manet. Manet decides to lock Ronald in a room away from him. He is stuck on this planet for the next eighteen years, and will need some kind of company. He goes to work on creating his second companion, a girl. \nVeronica is sweet, she talks kindly to Manet, and throws herself at him, which he swerves. Manet thinks her to be even more stupid than Ronald, and ends up striking her, which he finds he enjoys. He locks her in the same room as Ronald. \nManet once again goes back to the box, and goes to the last page of the handbook, entitled, \"The Final Model\". He creates this new being, whom he calls Victor. Victor jumps to life, and into the kit, destroying the item that Manet now realises was the modifier. Vitor explains to Manet that he is his enemy. He is just as intelligent as Manet, and is his designated adversary. Now that the modifier is destroyed, Manet will have no way to ever alter Veronica or Ronald, and will be stuck with the same silly, innocent people as he grows old. Manet will be bored for eighteen years. Manet replies to Victor, explaining, now that he has an enemy, he will never be bored. "}
{"id": "50818_1", "pid": "50818_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\n \n \n By JIM HARMON\n \n Illustrated by WEST\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Every lonely man tries to make friends. Manet just didn't know when to stop!\n \n \n \n William Manet was alone.\n \n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.\n \n He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and think more like a god than any man for generations.\n \n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n \n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n \n Lately she was winking back at him.\n \n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.\n \n No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet could only be this lonely on Mars.\n \n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n \n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat, flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was needed here\u2014no human being, at least.\n \n The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.\n \n They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet and his fellows.\n \n The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.\n \n But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered wonderful opportunities.\n \n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as bright as envy.\n \n \n\n \n Manet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia. Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest, making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a kind of climaxing release of terror.\n \n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.\n \n He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n \n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n \n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n \n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm fine .\" He let the word hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what place this is?\"\n \n The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n \n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n \n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's me exactly. Trader Tom Service\u2014Serving the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the planets.\"\n \n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey, immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.\n \n \"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a government service. I represent free enterprise.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n \n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known. Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper. They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things they can forego the papers. Comprehend, mon ami ? My businessmen have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"\n \n \"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this glass of whiskey.\"\n \n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n \n \"Very good.\"\n \n \"Excellent?\"\n \n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n \n \"I only meant\u2014but never mind. We give you what you want. As for paying for it\u2014why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a Trader Tom Credit Card.\"\n \n \"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n\"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n \n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You never pay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your estate .\"\n \n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n \n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n \n \"Whatever you want?\"\n \n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n \n \"You know.\"\n \n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"\n \n \"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only sell . I am a trader\u2014Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Folk legend!\"\n \n \"On the contrary, mon cher , the only reality it lacks is political reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n \n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual, you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so much.\"\n \n Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\n \n \n\n \n When he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was pushing it across the floor towards him.\n \n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't wood\u2014only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\n \n \n LIFO\n   The Socialization Kit\n \n \n \"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n\"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic, aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer\u2014but that is reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n \n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the charges.\"\n \n \"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the Trader Tom plan.\"\n \n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n \n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any complaints yet.\"\n \n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n \n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n \n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.\n \n Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk, suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n \n So he went to open the box.\n \n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n \n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.\n \n On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the Reader's Digest , covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in black on the spine and cover: The Making of Friends .\n \n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title in larger print and slightly amplified: The Making of Friends and Others . There was no author listed. A further line of information stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD., SYRACUSE.\n \n The unnumbered first chapter was headed Your First Friend .\n \n Before you go further, first find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital .\n \n He quickly riffled through the pages. Other Friends, Authority, A Companion .... Then The Final Model . Manet tried to flip past this section, but the pages after the sheet labeled The Final Model were stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n \n Manet flipped back to page one.\n \n First find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital to your entire experiment in socialization. The Modifier is Part #A-1 on the Master Chart.\n \n He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits. Maybe even the Modifier itself.\n \n He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand.\n \n The toe bone was connected to the foot bone....\n \n \n\n \n The Red King sat smugly in his diagonal corner.\n \n The Black King stood two places away, his top half tipsy in frustration.\n \n The Red King crabbed sideways one square.\n \n The Black King pounced forward one space.\n \n The Red King advanced backwards to face the enemy.\n \n The Black King shuffled sideways.\n \n The Red King followed....\n \n Uselessly.\n \n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n \n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n \n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n \n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him. Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n \n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said pontifically.\n \n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him.\n \n Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress. Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n \n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts, that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n \n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines, the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing, ad nauseum . What a narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal human being?\n \n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.\n \n Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties\u2014Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson, Sam Merwin tennis stories, Saturday Evening Post covers\u2014when he had first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm opinions on all these.\n \n He yearned for someone to challenge him\u2014to say that Dime Sports had been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why, Sewanee Review , there had been a magazine for you.\n \n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n \n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n \n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.\n \n Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n \n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n \n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the diesel works, closed again.\n \n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n \n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of Ronald's jaw.\n \n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n \n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n\"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n \n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n \n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"\n \n Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n \n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n \n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n \n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that their checker games always ended in a tie?\n \n \n\n \n The calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n \n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n \n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent wall.\n \n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.\n \n And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n \n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles and patchy sunburn.\n \n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward Communication.\n \n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on the walls of the tubeway.\n \n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n \n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n \n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.\n \n In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback of the transmission.\n \n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C. It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York swing.\n \n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present schedule\u2014\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word\u2014\"for atmosphere seeding.\n \n \"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources of two hundred and seventy-four years is not an official government estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to believe our original estimate was substantially correct. The total time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n \n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n \n He sat there thinking about eighteen years.\n \n He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns.\n \n Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out. There was a lot left inside.\n \n One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one of them, he now knew, was the Modifier.\n \n The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off.\n \n If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head. Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to nothing whatsoever.\n \n Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n \n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types. Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain compensations.\n \n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed: The Making of a Girl .\n \n \n\n \n Veronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n \n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his life.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"\n \n She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n \n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n \n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather bristly, masculine countenance.\n \n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n \n She made her return.\n \n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n \n \"Whenever you say.\"\n \n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment. There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n \n \"Now?\" she asked.\n \n \"I'll tell you.\"\n \n \"If you were a jet pilot,\" Veronica said wistfully, \"you would be romantic. You would grab love when you could. You would never know which moment would be last. You would make the most of each one.\"\n \n \"I'm not a jet pilot,\" Manet said. \"There are no jet pilots. There haven't been any for generations.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Veronica said. \"Who else would stop those vile North Koreans and Red China 'volunteers'?\"\n \n \"Veronica,\" he said carefully, \"the Korean War is over. It was finished even before the last of the jet pilots.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" she snapped. \"If it were over, I'd know about it, wouldn't I?\"\n \n She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright, less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald. Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n \n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n \n \"Oh, yes.\"\n \n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n \n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n \n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight in you at all?\"\n \n He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n \n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n \n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\n \n \n\n \n Ronald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the corridor.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n \n \"No, darling.\"\n \n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore the noise. She was still following orders.\n \n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried through sepulchrally.\n \n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n \n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.\n \n A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n \n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the station.\n \n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n \n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n \n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n \n But he looked offended.\n \n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n\"inside, inside.\"\n \n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.\n \n \"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year, forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n \n \"If you think it's the right thing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n \n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n \n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n \n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he walked too carefully for this to happen.\n \n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion, William, you should let us out.\"\n \n \"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill, dearest.\"\n \n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n \n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n \n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\n \n \n\n \n Pouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the box to go around.\n \n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n \n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.\n \n He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n \n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n \n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n \n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n \n He glanced forward and found the headings: The Final Model .\n \n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he could.\n \n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and under his fingers....\n \n Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n \n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n \n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n \n \"Move!\"\n \n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the flesh-sprayers.\n \n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n \n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n \n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n \n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should understand. I am different from the others.\"\n \n \"They all say that.\"\n \n \"I am not your friend.\"\n \n \"No?\"\n \n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n \n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure at the symmetry of the situation.\n \n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have all your knowledge. You do not have all your knowledge. If you let yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n \n \"When do you start?\"\n \n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n \n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.\n \n \"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man. I've seen that you will always keep your friends. \"\n \n \n\n \n The prospect was frightful.\n \n Victor smiled. \"Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?\"\n \n \"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you are through? You have fulfilled your function?\"\n \n \"Yes. Yes.\"\n \n \"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see me suffer?\"\n \n \" Yes. \"\n \n \"No. Can't do it, old man. Can't. I know. You're too human, too like me. The one thing a man can't accept is a passive state, a state of uselessness. Not if he can possibly avoid it. Something has to be happening to him. He has to be happening to something. You didn't kill me because then you would have nothing left to do. You'll never kill me.\"\n \n \"Of course not!\" Victor stormed. \"Fundamental safety cut-off!\"\n \n \"Rationalization. You don't want to kill me. And you can't stop challenging me at every turn. That's your function.\"\n \n \"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n \n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a friend!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29872, "query_start_index": 29874, "query_end_index": 29914, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "William Manet is an extremely lonely man and is the only human who works at his station. He is part of a small pressure group called the Workers\u2019 Union and works as an Overseer that focuses on the colonization of Mars. He cannot leave his job, but it has a high salary and good future opportunities. Manet sees a spaceship land nearby, and he begins to think he is hallucinating. He goes out to meet the spaceship, and the other man introduces himself as Trader Tom. He says that he serves the wants of spacemen and represents free enterprise. When Manet is suspicious, Tom explains that his businessmen have gone back to the barter system. Furthermore, Manet can also apply for the Trader Tom\u2019s Credit Card and have charges deducted from his estate as payment. He tells Tom that he wants to be alone, and Tom lets him sign a card. He is then given a socialization kit, to which Tom tells him that there have been no complaints about it so far. Manet ignores the box for as long as possible, but he eventually gives in and opens it. There is a collection of junk inside the box and a book titled The Making of Friends and Others. The book gives him instructions on how to create his friend. He then begins to play games with his new friend Ronald. He makes Ronald as somebody with opposite traits as him and enjoys knowing more than his new friend. After a while, however, Manet gets annoyed by Ronald, and the two of them fight. The time then skips to Spring, and Manet has locked Ronald away hoping that he will shut down by himself. He then gets a transmission from the B.B.C, explaining that the estimated time of departure for the Overseers was now eighteen years. Manet then goes back to the box, where he tries to find the Modifier amongst the many parts to shut down or change Ronald. Instead, he creates a girl named Veronica to keep him company. Veronica\u2019s personality is very shallow, and she constantly speaks of things that Manet considers stupid. He locks her up in the same place where he keeps Ronald, and both try to persuade him to let them out. Manet tries to find the Modifier again but instead finds the steps to create one final model. He does so and names it Victor. Suddenly, Victor destroys the Modifier and proclaims himself as Manet\u2019s enemy. He tells Manet that he will do everything he can to defeat him and. Victor says that his biggest accomplishment is destroying the Modifier, so Veronica, Ronald, and himself will continue to exist in the same way forever. Manet, however, is not afraid or concerned about Victor at all. He sees the \u201cenemy\u201d as an obstacle who must be triumphed and exclaims that he does not need friends if he has Victor as an enemy. "}
{"id": "50818_1", "pid": "50818_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\n \n \n By JIM HARMON\n \n Illustrated by WEST\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Every lonely man tries to make friends. Manet just didn't know when to stop!\n \n \n \n William Manet was alone.\n \n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.\n \n He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and think more like a god than any man for generations.\n \n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n \n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n \n Lately she was winking back at him.\n \n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.\n \n No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet could only be this lonely on Mars.\n \n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n \n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat, flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was needed here\u2014no human being, at least.\n \n The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.\n \n They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet and his fellows.\n \n The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.\n \n But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered wonderful opportunities.\n \n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as bright as envy.\n \n \n\n \n Manet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia. Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest, making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a kind of climaxing release of terror.\n \n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.\n \n He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n \n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n \n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n \n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm fine .\" He let the word hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what place this is?\"\n \n The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n \n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n \n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's me exactly. Trader Tom Service\u2014Serving the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the planets.\"\n \n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey, immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.\n \n \"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a government service. I represent free enterprise.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n \n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known. Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper. They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things they can forego the papers. Comprehend, mon ami ? My businessmen have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"\n \n \"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this glass of whiskey.\"\n \n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n \n \"Very good.\"\n \n \"Excellent?\"\n \n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n \n \"I only meant\u2014but never mind. We give you what you want. As for paying for it\u2014why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a Trader Tom Credit Card.\"\n \n \"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n\"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n \n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You never pay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your estate .\"\n \n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n \n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n \n \"Whatever you want?\"\n \n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n \n \"You know.\"\n \n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"\n \n \"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only sell . I am a trader\u2014Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Folk legend!\"\n \n \"On the contrary, mon cher , the only reality it lacks is political reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n \n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual, you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so much.\"\n \n Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\n \n \n\n \n When he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was pushing it across the floor towards him.\n \n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't wood\u2014only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\n \n \n LIFO\n   The Socialization Kit\n \n \n \"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n\"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic, aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer\u2014but that is reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n \n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the charges.\"\n \n \"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the Trader Tom plan.\"\n \n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n \n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any complaints yet.\"\n \n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n \n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n \n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.\n \n Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk, suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n \n So he went to open the box.\n \n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n \n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.\n \n On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the Reader's Digest , covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in black on the spine and cover: The Making of Friends .\n \n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title in larger print and slightly amplified: The Making of Friends and Others . There was no author listed. A further line of information stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD., SYRACUSE.\n \n The unnumbered first chapter was headed Your First Friend .\n \n Before you go further, first find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital .\n \n He quickly riffled through the pages. Other Friends, Authority, A Companion .... Then The Final Model . Manet tried to flip past this section, but the pages after the sheet labeled The Final Model were stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n \n Manet flipped back to page one.\n \n First find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital to your entire experiment in socialization. The Modifier is Part #A-1 on the Master Chart.\n \n He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits. Maybe even the Modifier itself.\n \n He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand.\n \n The toe bone was connected to the foot bone....\n \n \n\n \n The Red King sat smugly in his diagonal corner.\n \n The Black King stood two places away, his top half tipsy in frustration.\n \n The Red King crabbed sideways one square.\n \n The Black King pounced forward one space.\n \n The Red King advanced backwards to face the enemy.\n \n The Black King shuffled sideways.\n \n The Red King followed....\n \n Uselessly.\n \n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n \n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n \n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n \n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him. Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n \n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said pontifically.\n \n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him.\n \n Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress. Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n \n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts, that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n \n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines, the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing, ad nauseum . What a narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal human being?\n \n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.\n \n Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties\u2014Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson, Sam Merwin tennis stories, Saturday Evening Post covers\u2014when he had first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm opinions on all these.\n \n He yearned for someone to challenge him\u2014to say that Dime Sports had been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why, Sewanee Review , there had been a magazine for you.\n \n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n \n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n \n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.\n \n Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n \n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n \n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the diesel works, closed again.\n \n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n \n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of Ronald's jaw.\n \n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n \n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n\"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n \n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n \n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"\n \n Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n \n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n \n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n \n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that their checker games always ended in a tie?\n \n \n\n \n The calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n \n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n \n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent wall.\n \n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.\n \n And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n \n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles and patchy sunburn.\n \n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward Communication.\n \n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on the walls of the tubeway.\n \n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n \n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n \n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.\n \n In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback of the transmission.\n \n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C. It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York swing.\n \n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present schedule\u2014\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word\u2014\"for atmosphere seeding.\n \n \"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources of two hundred and seventy-four years is not an official government estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to believe our original estimate was substantially correct. The total time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n \n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n \n He sat there thinking about eighteen years.\n \n He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns.\n \n Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out. There was a lot left inside.\n \n One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one of them, he now knew, was the Modifier.\n \n The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off.\n \n If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head. Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to nothing whatsoever.\n \n Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n \n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types. Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain compensations.\n \n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed: The Making of a Girl .\n \n \n\n \n Veronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n \n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his life.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"\n \n She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n \n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n \n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather bristly, masculine countenance.\n \n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n \n She made her return.\n \n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n \n \"Whenever you say.\"\n \n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment. There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n \n \"Now?\" she asked.\n \n \"I'll tell you.\"\n \n \"If you were a jet pilot,\" Veronica said wistfully, \"you would be romantic. You would grab love when you could. You would never know which moment would be last. You would make the most of each one.\"\n \n \"I'm not a jet pilot,\" Manet said. \"There are no jet pilots. There haven't been any for generations.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Veronica said. \"Who else would stop those vile North Koreans and Red China 'volunteers'?\"\n \n \"Veronica,\" he said carefully, \"the Korean War is over. It was finished even before the last of the jet pilots.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" she snapped. \"If it were over, I'd know about it, wouldn't I?\"\n \n She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright, less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald. Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n \n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n \n \"Oh, yes.\"\n \n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n \n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n \n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight in you at all?\"\n \n He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n \n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n \n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\n \n \n\n \n Ronald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the corridor.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n \n \"No, darling.\"\n \n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore the noise. She was still following orders.\n \n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried through sepulchrally.\n \n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n \n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.\n \n A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n \n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the station.\n \n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n \n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n \n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n \n But he looked offended.\n \n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n\"inside, inside.\"\n \n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.\n \n \"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year, forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n \n \"If you think it's the right thing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n \n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n \n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n \n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he walked too carefully for this to happen.\n \n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion, William, you should let us out.\"\n \n \"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill, dearest.\"\n \n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n \n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n \n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\n \n \n\n \n Pouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the box to go around.\n \n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n \n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.\n \n He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n \n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n \n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n \n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n \n He glanced forward and found the headings: The Final Model .\n \n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he could.\n \n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and under his fingers....\n \n Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n \n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n \n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n \n \"Move!\"\n \n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the flesh-sprayers.\n \n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n \n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n \n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n \n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should understand. I am different from the others.\"\n \n \"They all say that.\"\n \n \"I am not your friend.\"\n \n \"No?\"\n \n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n \n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure at the symmetry of the situation.\n \n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have all your knowledge. You do not have all your knowledge. If you let yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n \n \"When do you start?\"\n \n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n \n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.\n \n \"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man. I've seen that you will always keep your friends. \"\n \n \n\n \n The prospect was frightful.\n \n Victor smiled. \"Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?\"\n \n \"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you are through? You have fulfilled your function?\"\n \n \"Yes. Yes.\"\n \n \"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see me suffer?\"\n \n \" Yes. \"\n \n \"No. Can't do it, old man. Can't. I know. You're too human, too like me. The one thing a man can't accept is a passive state, a state of uselessness. Not if he can possibly avoid it. Something has to be happening to him. He has to be happening to something. You didn't kill me because then you would have nothing left to do. You'll never kill me.\"\n \n \"Of course not!\" Victor stormed. \"Fundamental safety cut-off!\"\n \n \"Rationalization. You don't want to kill me. And you can't stop challenging me at every turn. That's your function.\"\n \n \"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n \n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a friend!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29872, "query_start_index": 29874, "query_end_index": 29914, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "William Manet is a man stranded alone on Mars. He has taken a job as an Overseer, hired to monitor several Seeders scattered on the planet in order to prepare Earth for colonization of the planet. Though the job is well-paying, Manet is to be at his station indefinitely, alone. Initially, Manet liked the idea of being alone, but he quickly became bored and lonely, and anticipated his madness. One day, Manet sees a ship landing on the surface of Mars outside; he is wary of his own mind and wonders if it is a hallucination, but he approaches the ship anyway, where he enters a cabin and meets a strange man, who refers to himself as Trader Tom. Trader Tom introduces himself and his business, which aims to serve spacemen through a bartering system. Manet is skeptical as to how such a business could exist, and how he would be able to afford whatever services are provided. Trader Tom asks Manet what it is that he wants, to which Manet expresses his loneliness. He gives Manet a Socialization Kit, which is meant to replicate human interaction. Manet makes the deal, but waits a while to open the box. When he finally decides to, he comes across a manual, which advises Manet to find the Modifier inside the kit, which is critical. However, Manet is unable to find the Modifier, as he does not know what it looks like. He ends up creating Ronald, meant to be a companion who is cheerful, pleasant, yet not as smart as Manet. Manet soon becomes tired and irritated with Ronald's repetitive nature, wearing out the same dialogue and topics of conversation. Eventually, Manet locks Ronald in his file room. He later gets a message from the B.B.C, explaining that though his estimated stay time had previously been longer, it has lowered to 18 years. Still unable to locate the Modifier, Manet creates a woman, Veronica, who also ends up being too submissive and repetitive for his taste, and he locks her in with Ronald. Manet comes across instructions for creating \"The Final Model\", which spawns Victor, who immediately destroys what must have been the Modifier. Victor explains that he is not a friend for Manet, but an enemy, meant to challenge and defeat him. Manet realizes that Victor will cure his boredom by presenting obstacles for him to work around every day."}
{"id": "50818_1", "pid": "50818_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nHOW TO MAKE FRIENDS\n \n \n By JIM HARMON\n \n Illustrated by WEST\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n\n Every lonely man tries to make friends. Manet just didn't know when to stop!\n \n \n \n William Manet was alone.\n \n In the beginning, he had seen many advantages to being alone. It would give him an unprecedented opportunity to once and for all correlate loneliness to the point of madness, to see how long it would take him to start slavering and clawing the pin-ups from the magazines, to begin teaching himself classes in philosophy consisting of interminable lectures to a bored and captive audience of one.\n \n He would be able to measure the qualities of peace and decide whether it was really better than war, he would be able to get as fat and as dirty as he liked, he would be able to live more like an animal and think more like a god than any man for generations.\n \n But after a shorter time than he expected, it all got to be a tearing bore. Even the waiting to go crazy part of it.\n \n Not that he was going to have any great long wait of it. He was already talking to himself, making verbal notes for his lectures, and he had cut out a picture of Annie Oakley from an old book. He tacked it up and winked at it whenever he passed that way.\n \n Lately she was winking back at him.\n \n Loneliness was a physical weight on his skull. It peeled the flesh from his arms and legs and sandpapered his self-pity to a fine sensitivity.\n \n No one on Earth was as lonely as William Manet, and even William Manet could only be this lonely on Mars.\n \n Manet was Atmosphere Seeder Station 131-47's own human.\n \n All Manet had to do was sit in the beating aluminum heart in the middle of the chalk desert and stare out, chin cupped in hands, at the flat, flat pavement of dirty talcum, at the stars gleaming as hard in the black sky as a starlet's capped teeth ... stars two of which were moons and one of which was Earth. He had to do nothing else. The whole gimcrack was cybernetically controlled, entirely automatic. No one was needed here\u2014no human being, at least.\n \n The Workers' Union was a pretty small pressure group, but it didn't take much to pressure the Assembly. Featherbedding had been carefully specified, including an Overseer for each of the Seeders to honeycomb Mars, to prepare its atmosphere for colonization.\n \n They didn't give tests to find well-balanced, well-integrated people for the job. Well-balanced, well-integrated men weren't going to isolate themselves in a useless job. They got, instead, William Manet and his fellows.\n \n The Overseers were to stay as long as the job required. Passenger fare to Mars was about one billion dollars. They weren't providing commuter service for night shifts. They weren't providing accommodations for couples when the law specified only one occupant. They weren't providing fuel (at fifty million dollars a gallon) for visits between the various Overseers. They weren't very providential.\n \n But it was two hundred thousand a year in salary, and it offered wonderful opportunities.\n \n It gave William Manet an opportunity to think he saw a spaceship making a tailfirst landing on the table of the desert, its tail burning as bright as envy.\n \n \n\n \n Manet suspected hallucination, but in an existence with all the pallid dispassion of a requited love he was happy to welcome dementia. Sometimes he even manufactured it. Sometimes he would run through the arteries of the factory and play that it had suddenly gone mad hating human beings, and was about to close down its bulkheads on him as sure as the Engineers' Thumb and bale up the pressure-dehydrated digest, making so much stall flooring of him. He ran until he dropped with a kind of climaxing release of terror.\n \n So Manet put on the pressure suit he had been given because he would never need it, and marched out to meet the visiting spaceship.\n \n He wasn't quite clear how he came from walking effortlessly across the Martian plain that had all the distance-perpetuating qualities of a kid's crank movie machine to the comfortable interior of a strange cabin. Not a ship's cabin but a Northwoods cabin.\n \n The black and orange Hallowe'en log charring in the slate stone fireplace seemed real. So did the lean man with the smiling mustache painted with the random designs of the fire, standing before the horizontal pattern of chinked wall.\n \n \"Need a fresher?\" the host inquired.\n \n Manet's eyes wondered down to heavy water tumbler full of rich, amber whiskey full of sparks from the hearth. He stirred himself in the comfortingly warm leather chair. \"No, no, I'm fine .\" He let the word hang there for examination. \"Pardon me, but could you tell me just what place this is?\"\n \n The host shrugged. It was the only word for it. \"Whatever place you choose it to be, so long as you're with Trader Tom. 'Service,' that's my motto. It is a way of life with me.\"\n \n \"Trader Tom? Service?\"\n \n \"Yes! That's it exactly. It's me exactly. Trader Tom Service\u2014Serving the Wants of the Spaceman Between the Stars. Of course, 'stars' is poetic. Any point of light in the sky in a star. We service the planets.\"\n \n Manet took the tumbler in both hands and drank. It was good whiskey, immensely powerful. \"The government wouldn't pay for somebody serving the wants of spacemen,\" he exploded.\n \n \"Ah,\" Trader Tom said, cautionary. He moved nearer the fire and warmed his hands and buttocks. \"Ah, but I am not a government service. I represent free enterprise.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Nonsense,\" Manet said. \"No group of private individuals can build a spaceship. It takes a combine of nations.\"\n \n \"But remember only that businessmen are reactionary. It's well-known. Ask anyone on the street. Businessmen are reactionary even beyond the capitalistic system. Money is a fiction that exists mostly on paper. They play along on paper to get paper things, but to get real things they can forego the papers. Comprehend, mon ami ? My businessmen have gone back to the barter system. Between them, they have the raw materials, the trained men, the man-hours to make a spaceship. So they make it. Damned reactionaries, all of my principals.\"\n \n \"I don't believe you,\" Manet stated flatly. His conversation had grown blunt with disuse. \"What possible profit could your principals turn from running a trading ship among scattered exploration posts on the planets? What could you give us that a benevolent government doesn't already supply us with? And if there was anything, how could we pay for it? My year's salary wouldn't cover the transportation costs of this glass of whiskey.\"\n \n \"Do you find it good whiskey?\"\n \n \"Very good.\"\n \n \"Excellent?\"\n \n \"Excellent, if you prefer.\"\n \n \"I only meant\u2014but never mind. We give you what you want. As for paying for it\u2014why, forget about the payment. You may apply for a Trader Tom Credit Card.\"\n \n \"And I could buy anything that I wanted with it?\" Manet demanded.\n\"That's absurd. I'd never be able to pay for it.\"\n \n \"That's it precisely!\" Trader Tom said with enthusiasm. \"You never pay for it. Charges are merely deducted from your estate .\"\n \n \"But I may leave no estate!\"\n \n Trader Tom demonstrated his peculiar shrug. \"All businesses operate on a certain margin of risk. That is our worry.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet finished the mellow whiskey and looked into the glass. It seemed to have been polished clean. \"What do you have to offer?\"\n \n \"Whatever you want?\"\n \n Irritably, \"How do I know what I want until I know what you have?\"\n \n \"You know.\"\n \n \"I know? All right, I know. You don't have it for sale.\"\n \n \"Old chap, understand if you please that I do not only sell . I am a trader\u2014Trader Tom. I trade with many parties. There are, for example ... extraterrestrials.\"\n \n \"Folk legend!\"\n \n \"On the contrary, mon cher , the only reality it lacks is political reality. The Assembly could no longer justify their disposition of the cosmos if it were known they were dealing confiscation without representation. Come, tell me what you want.\"\n \n Manet gave in to it. \"I want to be not alone,\" he said.\n \n \"Of course,\" Trader Tom replied, \"I suspected. It is not so unusual, you know. Sign here. And here. Two copies. This is yours. Thank you so much.\"\n \n Manet handed back the pen and stared at the laminated card in his hand.\n \n \n\n \n When he looked up from the card, Manet saw the box. Trader Tom was pushing it across the floor towards him.\n \n The box had the general dimensions of a coffin, but it wasn't wood\u2014only brightly illustrated cardboard. There was a large four-color picture on the lid showing men, women and children moving through a busy city street. The red and blue letters said:\n \n \n LIFO\n   The Socialization Kit\n \n \n \"It is commercialized,\" Trader Tom admitted with no little chagrin.\n\"It is presented to appeal to a twelve-year-old child, an erotic, aggressive twelve-year-old, the typical sensie goer\u2014but that is reality. It offends men of good taste like ourselves, yet sometimes it approaches being art. We must accept it.\"\n \n \"What's the cost?\" Manet asked. \"Before I accept it, I have to know the charges.\"\n \n \"You never know the cost. Only your executor knows that. It's the Trader Tom plan.\"\n \n \"Well, is it guaranteed?\"\n \n \"There are no guarantees,\" Trader Tom admitted. \"But I've never had any complaints yet.\"\n \n \"Suppose I'm the first?\" Manet suggested reasonably.\n \n \"You won't be,\" Trader Tom said. \"I won't pass this way again.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet didn't open the box. He let it fade quietly in the filtered but still brilliant sunlight near a transparent wall.\n \n Manet puttered around the spawning monster, trying to brush the copper taste of the station out of his mouth in the mornings, talking to himself, winking at Annie Oakley, and waiting to go mad.\n \n Finally, Manet woke up one morning. He lay in the sheets of his bunk, suppressing the urge to go wash his hands, and came at last to the conclusion that, after all the delay, he was mad.\n \n So he went to open the box.\n \n The cardboard lid seemed to have become both brittle and rotten. It crumbled as easily as ideals. But Manet was old enough to remember the boxes Japanese toys came in when he was a boy, and was not alarmed.\n \n The contents were such a glorious pile of junk, of bottles from old chemistry sets, of pieces from old Erector sets, of nameless things and unremembered antiques from neglected places, that it seemed too good to have been assembled commercially. It was the collection of lifetime.\n \n On top of everything was a paperbound book, the size of the Reader's Digest , covered in rippled gray flexiboard. The title was stamped in black on the spine and cover: The Making of Friends .\n \n Manet opened the book and, turning one blank page, found the title in larger print and slightly amplified: The Making of Friends and Others . There was no author listed. A further line of information stated: \"A Manual for Lifo, The Socialization Kit.\" At the bottom of the title page, the publisher was identified as: LIFO KIT CO., LTD., SYRACUSE.\n \n The unnumbered first chapter was headed Your First Friend .\n \n Before you go further, first find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital .\n \n He quickly riffled through the pages. Other Friends, Authority, A Companion .... Then The Final Model . Manet tried to flip past this section, but the pages after the sheet labeled The Final Model were stuck together. More than stuck. There was a thick slab of plastic in the back of the book. The edges were ridged as if there were pages to this section, but they could only be the tracks of lame ants.\n \n Manet flipped back to page one.\n \n First find the Modifier in your kit. This is vital to your entire experiment in socialization. The Modifier is Part #A-1 on the Master Chart.\n \n He prowled through the box looking for some kind of a chart. There was nothing that looked like a chart inside. He retrieved the lid and looked at its inside. Nothing. He tipped the box and looked at its outside. Not a thing. There was always something missing from kits. Maybe even the Modifier itself.\n \n He read on, and probed and scattered the parts in the long box. He studied the manual intently and groped out with his free hand.\n \n The toe bone was connected to the foot bone....\n \n \n\n \n The Red King sat smugly in his diagonal corner.\n \n The Black King stood two places away, his top half tipsy in frustration.\n \n The Red King crabbed sideways one square.\n \n The Black King pounced forward one space.\n \n The Red King advanced backwards to face the enemy.\n \n The Black King shuffled sideways.\n \n The Red King followed....\n \n Uselessly.\n \n \"Tie game,\" Ronald said.\n \n \"Tie game,\" Manet said.\n \n \"Let's talk,\" Ronald said cheerfully. He was always cheerful.\n \n Cheerfulness was a personality trait Manet had thumbed out for him. Cheerful. Submissive. Co-operative. Manet had selected these factors in order to make Ronald as different a person from himself as possible.\n \n \"The Korean-American War was the greatest of all wars,\" Ronald said pontifically.\n \n \"Only in the air,\" Manet corrected him.\n \n Intelligence was one of the factors Manet had punched to suppress. Intelligence. Aggressiveness. Sense of perfection. Ronald couldn't know any more than Manet, but he could (and did) know less. He had seen to that when his own encephalograph matrix had programmed Ronald's feeder.\n \n \"There were no dogfights in Korea,\" Ronald said.\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \"The dogfight was a combat of hundreds of planes in a tight area, the last of which took place near the end of the First World War. The aerial duel, sometimes inaccurately referred to as a 'dogfight' was not seen in Korea either. The pilots at supersonic speeds only had time for single passes at the enemy. Still, I believe, contrary to all experts, that this took greater skill, man more wedded to machine, than the leisurely combats of World War One.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \"Daniel Boone was still a crack shot at eight-five. He was said to be warm, sincere, modest, truthful, respected and rheumatic.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n \n\n \n Manet knew it all. He had heard it all before.\n \n He was so damned sick of hearing about Korean air battles, Daniel Boone, the literary qualities of ancient sports fiction magazines, the painting of Norman Rockwell, New York swing, ad nauseum . What a narrow band of interests! With the whole universe to explore in thought and concept, why did he have to be trapped with such an unoriginal human being?\n \n Of course, Ronald wasn't an original human being. He was a copy.\n \n Manet had been interested in the Fabulous Forties\u2014Lt. \"Hoot\" Gibson, Sam Merwin tennis stories, Saturday Evening Post covers\u2014when he had first learned of them, and he had learned all about them. He had firm opinions on all these.\n \n He yearned for someone to challenge him\u2014to say that Dime Sports had been nothing but a cheap yellow rag and, why, Sewanee Review , there had been a magazine for you.\n \n Manet's only consolidation was that Ronald's tastes were lower than his own. He patriotically insisted that the American Sabre Jet was superior to the Mig. He maintained with a straight face that Tommy Dorsey was a better band man than Benny Goodman. Ronald was a terrific jerk.\n \n \"Ronald,\" Manet said, \"you are a terrific jerk.\"\n \n Ronald leaped up immediately and led with his right.\n \n Manet blocked it deftly and threw a right cross.\n \n Ronald blocked it deftly, and drove in a right to the navel.\n \n The two men separated and, puffing like steam locomotives passing the diesel works, closed again.\n \n Ronald leaped forward and led with his right.\n \n Manet stepped inside the swing and lifted an uppercut to the ledge of Ronald's jaw.\n \n Ronald pinwheeled to the floor.\n \n He lifted his bruised head from the deck and worked his reddened mouth.\n\"Had enough?\" he asked Manet.\n \n Manet dropped his fists to his sides and turned away. \"Yes.\"\n \n Ronald hopped up lightly. \"Another checkers, Billy Boy?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Okay. Anything you want, William, old conquerer.\"\n \n Manet scrunched up inside himself in impotent fury.\n \n Ronald was maddeningly co-operative and peaceful. He would even get in a fist fight to avoid trouble between them. He would do anything Manet wanted him to do. He was so utterly damned stupid.\n \n Manet's eyes orbitted towards the checkerboard.\n \n But if he were so much more stupid than he, Manet, why was it that their checker games always ended in a tie?\n \n \n\n \n The calendar said it was Spring on Earth when the radio was activated for a high-speed information and entertainment transmission.\n \n The buzzer-flasher activated in the solarium at the same time.\n \n Manet lay stretched out on his back, naked, in front of the transparent wall.\n \n By rolling his eyes back in his head, Manet could see over a hedge of eyebrows for several hundred flat miles of white sand.\n \n And several hundred miles of desert could see him.\n \n For a moment he gloried in the blatant display of his flabby muscles and patchy sunburn.\n \n Then he sighed, rolled over to his feet and started trudging toward Communication.\n \n He padded down the rib-ridged matted corridor, taking his usual small pleasure in the kaleidoscopic effect of the spiraling reflections on the walls of the tubeway.\n \n As he passed the File Room, he caught the sound of the pounding vibrations against the stoppered plug of the hatch.\n \n \"Come on, Billy Buddy, let me out of this place!\"\n \n Manet padded on down the hall. He had, he recalled, shoved Ronald in there on Lincoln's Birthday, a minor ironic twist he appreciated quietly. He had been waiting in vain for Ronald to run down ever since.\n \n In Communication, he took a seat and punched the slowed down playback of the transmission.\n \n \"Hello, Overseers,\" the Voice said. It was the Voice of the B.B.C. It irritated Manet. He never understood how the British had got the space transmissions assignment for the English language. He would have preferred an American disk-jockey himself, one who appreciated New York swing.\n \n \"We imagine that you are most interested in how long you shall be required to stay at your present stations,\" said the Voice of God's paternal uncle. \"As you on Mars may know, there has been much discussion as to how long it will require to complete the present schedule\u2014\" there was of course no \"K\" sound in the word\u2014\"for atmosphere seeding.\n \n \"The original, non-binding estimate at the time of your departure was\n18.2 years. However, determining how long it will take our stations properly to remake the air of Mars is a problem comparable to finding the age of the Earth. Estimates change as new factors are learned. You may recall that three years ago the official estimate was changed to thirty-one years. The recent estimate by certain reactionary sources of two hundred and seventy-four years is not an official government estimate. The news for you is good, if you are becoming nostalgic for home, or not particularly bad if you are counting on drawing your handsome salary for the time spent on Mars. We have every reason to believe our original estimate was substantially correct. The total time is, within limits of error, a flat 18 years.\"\n \n A very flat 18 years, Manet thought as he palmed off the recorder.\n \n He sat there thinking about eighteen years.\n \n He did not switch to video for some freshly taped westerns.\n \n Finally, Manet went back to the solarium and dragged the big box out. There was a lot left inside.\n \n One of those parts, one of those bones or struts of flesh sprayers, one of them, he now knew, was the Modifier.\n \n The Modifier was what he needed to change Ronald. Or to shut him off.\n \n If only the Master Chart hadn't been lost, so he would know what the Modifier looked like! He hoped the Modifier itself wasn't lost. He hated to think of Ronald locked in the Usher tomb of the File Room for 18 flat years. Long before that, he would have worn his fists away hammering at the hatch. Then he might start pounding with his head. Perhaps before the time was up he would have worn himself down to nothing whatsoever.\n \n Manet selected the ripple-finished gray-covered manual from the hodgepodge, and thought: eighteen years.\n \n Perhaps I should have begun here, he told himself. But I really don't have as much interest in that sort of thing as the earthier types. Simple companionship was all I wanted. And, he thought on, even an insipid personality like Ronald's would be bearable with certain compensations.\n \n Manet opened the book to the chapter headed: The Making of a Girl .\n \n \n\n \n Veronica crept up behind Manet and slithered her hands up his back and over his shoulders. She leaned forward and breathed a moist warmth into his ear, and worried the lobe with her even white teeth.\n \n \"Daniel Boone,\" she sighed huskily, \"only killed three Indians in his life.\"\n \n \"I know.\"\n \n Manet folded his arms stoically and added: \"Please don't talk.\"\n \n She sighed her instant agreement and moved her expressive hands over his chest and up to the hollows of his throat.\n \n \"I need a shave,\" he observed.\n \n Her hands instantly caressed his face to prove that she liked a rather bristly, masculine countenance.\n \n Manet elbowed Veronica away in a gentlemanly fashion.\n \n She made her return.\n \n \"Not now,\" he instructed her.\n \n \"Whenever you say.\"\n \n He stood up and began pacing off the dimensions of the compartment. There was no doubt about it: he had been missing his regular exercise.\n \n \"Now?\" she asked.\n \n \"I'll tell you.\"\n \n \"If you were a jet pilot,\" Veronica said wistfully, \"you would be romantic. You would grab love when you could. You would never know which moment would be last. You would make the most of each one.\"\n \n \"I'm not a jet pilot,\" Manet said. \"There are no jet pilots. There haven't been any for generations.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" Veronica said. \"Who else would stop those vile North Koreans and Red China 'volunteers'?\"\n \n \"Veronica,\" he said carefully, \"the Korean War is over. It was finished even before the last of the jet pilots.\"\n \n \"Don't be silly,\" she snapped. \"If it were over, I'd know about it, wouldn't I?\"\n \n She would, except that somehow she had turned out even less bright, less equipped with Manet's own store of information, than Ronald. Whoever had built the Lifo kit must have had ancient ideas about what constituted appropriate \"feminine\" characteristics.\n \n \"I suppose,\" he said heavily, \"that you would like me to take you back to Earth and introduce you to Daniel Boone?\"\n \n \"Oh, yes.\"\n \n \"Veronica, your stupidity is hideous.\"\n \n She lowered her long blonde lashes on her pink cheeks. \"That is a mean thing to say to me. But I forgive you.\"\n \n An invisible hand began pressing down steadily on the top of his head until it forced a sound out of him. \"Aaaawrraagggh! Must you be so cloyingly sweet? Do you have to keep taking that? Isn't there any fight in you at all?\"\n \n He stepped forward and back-handed her across the jaw.\n \n It was the first time he had ever struck a woman, he realized regretfully. He now knew he should have been doing it long ago.\n \n Veronica sprang forward and led with a right.\n \n \n\n \n Ronald's cries grew louder as Manet marched Veronica through the corridor.\n \n \"Hear that?\" he inquired, smiling with clenched teeth.\n \n \"No, darling.\"\n \n Well, that was all right. He remembered he had once told her to ignore the noise. She was still following orders.\n \n \"Come on, Bill, open up the hatch for old Ronald,\" the voice carried through sepulchrally.\n \n \"Shut up!\" Manet yelled.\n \n The voice dwindled stubbornly, then cut off.\n \n A silence with a whisper of metallic ring to it.\n \n Why hadn't he thought of that before? Maybe because he secretly took comfort in the sound of an almost human voice echoing through the station.\n \n Manet threw back the bolt and wheeled back the hatch.\n \n Ronald looked just the same as had when Manet had seen him last. His hands didn't seem to have been worn away in the least. Ronald's lips seemed a trifle chapped. But that probably came not from all the shouting but from having nothing to drink for some months.\n \n Ronald didn't say anything to Manet.\n \n But he looked offended.\n \n \"You,\" Manet said to Veronica with a shove in the small of the back,\n\"inside, inside.\"\n \n Ronald sidestepped the lurching girl.\n \n \"Do you know what I'm going to do with you?\" Manet demanded. \"I'm going to lock you up in here, and leave you for a day, a month, a year, forever! Now what do you think about that?\"\n \n \"If you think it's the right thing, dear,\" Veronica said hesitantly.\n \n \"You know best, Willy,\" Ronald said uncertainly.\n \n Manet slammed the hatch in disgust.\n \n Manet walked carefully down the corridor, watching streamers of his reflection corkscrewing into the curved walls. He had to walk carefully, else the artery would roll up tight and squash him. But he walked too carefully for this to happen.\n \n As he passed the File Room, Ronald's voice said: \"In my opinion, William, you should let us out.\"\n \n \"I,\" Veronica said, \"honestly feel that you should let me out, Bill, dearest.\"\n \n Manet giggled. \"What? What was that? Do you suggest that I take you back after you've been behind a locked door with my best friend?\"\n \n He went down the corridor, giggling.\n \n He giggled and thought: This will never do.\n \n \n\n \n Pouring and tumbling through the Lifo kit, consulting the manual diligently, Manet concluded that there weren't enough parts left in the box to go around.\n \n The book gave instructions for The Model Mother, The Model Father, The Model Sibling and others. Yet there weren't parts enough in the kit.\n \n He would have to take parts from Ronald or Veronica in order to make any one of the others. And he could not do that without the Modifier.\n \n He wished Trader Tom would return and extract some higher price from him for the Modifier, which was clearly missing from the kit.\n \n Or to get even more for simply repossessing the kit.\n \n But Trader Tom would not be back. He came this way only once.\n \n Manet thumbed through the manual in mechanical frustration. As he did so, the solid piece of the last section parted sheet by sheet.\n \n He glanced forward and found the headings: The Final Model .\n \n There seemed something ominous about that finality. But he had paid a price for the kit, hadn't he? Who knew what price, when it came to that? He had every right to get everything out of the kit that he could.\n \n He read the unfolding page critically. The odd assortment of ill-matched parts left in the box took a new shape in his mind and under his fingers....\n \n Manet gave one final spurt from the flesh-sprayer and stood back.\n \n Victor was finished. Perfect.\n \n Manet stepped forward, lifted the model's left eyelid, tweaked his nose.\n \n \"Move!\"\n \n Victor leaped back into the Lifo kit and did a jig on one of the flesh-sprayers.\n \n As the device twisted as handily as good intentions, Manet realized that it was not a flesh-sprayer but the Modifier.\n \n \"It's finished!\" were Victor's first words. \"It's done!\"\n \n Manet stared at the tiny wreck. \"To say the least.\"\n \n Victor stepped out of the oblong box. \"There is something you should understand. I am different from the others.\"\n \n \"They all say that.\"\n \n \"I am not your friend.\"\n \n \"No?\"\n \n \"No. You have made yourself an enemy.\"\n \n Manet felt nothing more at this information than an esthetic pleasure at the symmetry of the situation.\n \n \"It completes the final course in socialization,\" Victor continued. \"I am your adversary. I will do everything I can to defeat you. I have all your knowledge. You do not have all your knowledge. If you let yourself know some of the things, it could be used against you. It is my function to use everything I possibly can against you.\"\n \n \"When do you start?\"\n \n \"I've finished. I've done my worst. I have destroyed the Modifier.\"\n \n \"What's so bad about that?\" Manet asked with some interest.\n \n \"You'll have Veronica and Ronald and me forever now. We'll never change. You'll get older, and we'll never change. You'll lose your interest in New York swing and jet combat and Daniel Boone, and we'll never change. We don't change and you can't change us for others. I've made the worst thing happen to you that can happen to any man. I've seen that you will always keep your friends. \"\n \n \n\n \n The prospect was frightful.\n \n Victor smiled. \"Aren't you going to denounce me for a fiend?\"\n \n \"Yes, it is time for the denouncement. Tell me, you feel that now you are through? You have fulfilled your function?\"\n \n \"Yes. Yes.\"\n \n \"Now you will have but to lean back, as it were, so to speak, and see me suffer?\"\n \n \" Yes. \"\n \n \"No. Can't do it, old man. Can't. I know. You're too human, too like me. The one thing a man can't accept is a passive state, a state of uselessness. Not if he can possibly avoid it. Something has to be happening to him. He has to be happening to something. You didn't kill me because then you would have nothing left to do. You'll never kill me.\"\n \n \"Of course not!\" Victor stormed. \"Fundamental safety cut-off!\"\n \n \"Rationalization. You don't want to kill me. And you can't stop challenging me at every turn. That's your function.\"\n \n \"Stop talking and just think about your miserable life,\" Victor said meanly. \"Your friends won't grow and mature with you. You won't make any new friends. You'll have me to constantly remind you of your uselessness, your constant unrelenting sterility of purpose. How's that for boredom, for passiveness?\"\n \n \"That's what I'm trying to tell you,\" Manet said irritably, his social manners rusty. \"I won't be bored. You will see to that. It's your purpose. You'll be a challenge, an obstacle, a source of triumph every foot of the way. Don't you see? With you for an enemy, I don't need a friend!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29872, "query_start_index": 29874, "query_end_index": 29914, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "William Manet is all alone and is going crazy step by step. He has wanted this experiment for a while but he becomes bored much faster than expected. He has accepted a useless position of an overseer of a station on Mars, all alone in the desert. The salary is high but nothing is provided regarding the overseer having some human interactions or commodities. One day Manet sees a spaceship and is unsure whether it is a hallucination. Nevertheless, he enters a strange cabin and a man offers him a good whiskey. To Manet's astonishment, it turns out the spaceship is created by a free enterprise to serve the spacemen. Manet says to the service that he wants not to be alone and gets a box, the cost is unknown. He doesn't open the box until he decides he is mad. In the box there is a socialization kit with instructions. Then a game follows between Manet and someone called Ronald and a dialogue about war takes place. Very soon, Manet gets bored and tired of his companion, turns out Ronald was a copy of a human with features Manet himself picked. One day Manet listens to BBC and hears that his time left on Mars is 18 years for now. He tries to find the modifier and change Ronald, in the next scene a girl called Veronica appears. She is a submissive and seductive human copy who took the place of Ronald. She is even more stupid and backward in knowledge than her predecessor, Ronald, who has been locked this whole time which was months. Now Veronica joins Ronald in the locked room. In a while the final model pages open up in the instructions and Manet creates Victor. Victor possesses all the knowledge Manet has and is created to defeat Manet, Victor destroys the modifier and wants to make the overseer upset by that. But Manet needed an enemy all this time not to be bored and he is more than happy to have this constant obstacle always in his way. \n"}
{"id": "61146_1", "pid": "61146_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAIN\n \n\n by KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n Retief knew the importance of sealed orders\u2014and the need to keep them that way!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"It's true,\" Consul Passwyn said, \"I requested assignment as principal officer at a small post. But I had in mind one of those charming resort worlds, with only an occasional visa problem, or perhaps a distressed spaceman or two a year. Instead, I'm zoo-keeper to these confounded settlers. And not for one world, mind you, but eight!\" He stared glumly at Vice-Consul Retief.\n \n \"Still,\" Retief said, \"it gives an opportunity to travel\u2014\"\n \n \"Travel!\" the consul barked. \"I hate travel. Here in this backwater system particularly\u2014\" He paused, blinked at Retief and cleared his throat. \"Not that a bit of travel isn't an excellent thing for a junior officer. Marvelous experience.\"\n \n He turned to the wall-screen and pressed a button. A system triagram appeared: eight luminous green dots arranged around a larger disk representing the primary. He picked up a pointer, indicating the innermost planet.\n \n \"The situation on Adobe is nearing crisis. The confounded settlers\u2014a mere handful of them\u2014have managed, as usual, to stir up trouble with an intelligent indigenous life form, the Jaq. I can't think why they bother, merely for a few oases among the endless deserts. However I have, at last, received authorization from Sector Headquarters to take certain action.\" He swung back to face Retief. \"I'm sending you in to handle the situation, Retief\u2014under sealed orders.\" He picked up a fat buff envelope. \"A pity they didn't see fit to order the Terrestrial settlers out weeks ago, as I suggested. Now it is too late. I'm expected to produce a miracle\u2014a rapprochement between Terrestrial and Adoban and a division of territory. It's idiotic. However, failure would look very bad in my record, so I shall expect results.\"\n \n He passed the buff envelope across to Retief.\n \n \"I understood that Adobe was uninhabited,\" Retief said, \"until the Terrestrial settlers arrived.\"\n \n \"Apparently, that was an erroneous impression.\" Passwyn fixed Retief with a watery eye. \"You'll follow your instructions to the letter. In a delicate situation such as this, there must be no impulsive, impromptu element introduced. This approach has been worked out in detail at Sector. You need merely implement it. Is that entirely clear?\"\n \n \"Has anyone at Headquarters ever visited Adobe?\"\n \n \"Of course not. They all hate travel. If there are no other questions, you'd best be on your way. The mail run departs the dome in less than an hour.\"\n \n \"What's this native life form like?\" Retief asked, getting to his feet.\n \n \"When you get back,\" said Passwyn, \"you tell me.\"\n \n \n\n \n The mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen.\n \n \"They's shootin' goin' on down there,\" he said. \"See them white puffs over the edge of the desert?\"\n \n \"I'm supposed to be preventing the war,\" said Retief. \"It looks like I'm a little late.\"\n \n The pilot's head snapped around. \"War?\" he yelped. \"Nobody told me they was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of here.\"\n \n \"Hold on,\" said Retief. \"I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you.\"\n \n \"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n \n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n \n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n \n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n \n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n \n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\"\n \n The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. \"Get in. We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob one this way....\"\n \n Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a heavy old-fashioned power pistol. \"Long as you're goin' in, might as well take this.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. \"I hope you're wrong.\"\n \n \"I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over\u2014one way or another.\"\n \n The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine....\n \n A crimson blip showed on the screen, moving out.\n \n Retief felt sweat pop out on his forehead. The red blip meant heavy radiation from a warhead. Somebody was playing around with an outlawed but by no means unheard of fission weapon. But maybe it was just on a high trajectory and had no connection with the skiff....\n \n Retief altered course to the south. The blip followed.\n \n He checked instrument readings, gripped the controls, watching. This was going to be tricky. The missile bored closer. At five miles Retief threw the light skiff into maximum acceleration, straight toward the oncoming bomb. Crushed back in the padded seat, he watched the screen, correcting course minutely. The proximity fuse should be set for no more than 1000 yards.\n \n At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining harness in the concussion of the explosion ... a mile astern, and harmless.\n \n Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed. Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the ping of hot metal contracting.\n \n \n\n \n Coughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet whined past his ear.\n \n He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left.\n \n He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life, buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped.\n \n Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log. A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving cautiously, a pistol in his hand.\n \n As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him.\n \n They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist\u2014\n \n \"Hey!\" the settler yelled. \"You're as human as I am!\"\n \n \"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea of shooting at me?\"\n \n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin' here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert lay.\n \n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n \n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n \n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't expect\u2014\"\n \n \"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n \n \"Yes. I'm\u2014\"\n \n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014\"\n \n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n \n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you was raised different.\"\n \n \"As a matter of fact\u2014\"\n \n \"Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand up on 'Dobe.\"\n \n Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue blazer and slacks.\n \n \"This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home,\" he said. \"But I guess leather has its points.\"\n \n \"Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown. And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a Flap-jack.\"\n \n \"I won't, but\u2014\"\n \n Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and followed Potter.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"We're damn glad you're here, mister,\" said a fat man with two revolvers belted across his paunch. \"We can use every hand. We're in bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it was fair game. I guess that was the start of it.\" He stirred the fire, added a stick.\n \n \"And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here,\" Potter said. \"Killed two of his cattle, and pulled back.\"\n \n \"I figure they thought the cows were people,\" said Swazey. \"They were out for revenge.\"\n \n \"How could anybody think a cow was folks?\" another man put in. \"They don't look nothin' like\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be so dumb, Bert,\" said Swazey. \"They'd never seen Terries before. They know better now.\"\n \n Bert chuckled. \"Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we, Potter? Got four.\"\n \n \"They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time,\" Swazey said. \"We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and run.\"\n \n \"Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around.\"\n \n \"It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid. But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied men.\"\n \n \"But we're hanging onto our farms,\" said Potter. \"All these oases are old sea-beds\u2014a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em while there's a man alive.\"\n \n \"The whole system needs the food we can raise,\" Bert said. \"These farms we're trying to start won't be enough but they'll help.\"\n \n \"We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory,\" said Potter. \"But you know these Embassy stooges.\"\n \n \"We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks,\" said Swazey. He tightened his mouth. \"We're waitin' for him....\"\n \n \"Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?\" Bert winked at Retief. \"We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory and Verde.\"\n \n \"Shut up, you damn fool!\" a deep voice grated.\n \n \"Lemuel!\" Potter said. \"Nobody else could sneak up on us like that.\"\n \n \"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said, moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather. He eyed Retief.\n \n \"Who's that?\"\n \n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n \n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n \n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\n \n \n\n \n Retief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain\u2014\"\n \n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note against his fringed buckskins.\n \n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"\n \n \"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n \n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n \n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it away.\"\n \n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n \n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n \n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n \n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"\n \n Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes, peered past the fire\u2014\n \n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a split second behind him.\n \n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n \n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n \n \"What's the idea...?\"\n \n \"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\n \n \n\n \n Five minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground. With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an out-cropping of rock.\n \n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet, clambered over the stone\u2014still hot after a day of tropical heat\u2014and moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand, palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n \n He sat down on the ground to wait.\n \n It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be right this time....\n \n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of sand as the Flap-jack charged.\n \n Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping Flap-jack\u2014a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter. It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it was, it seemed more like five hundred.\n \n The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a thumb slip into an orifice\u2014\n \n The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper.\n \n \"Sorry, fellow,\" he muttered between clenched teeth. \"Eye-gouging isn't gentlemanly, but it's effective....\"\n \n The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the thumb dug in.\n \n The alien went limp again, waiting.\n \n \"Now we understand each other,\" said Retief. \"Take me to your leader.\"\n \n \n\n \n Twenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long....\n \n A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off. He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket.\n \n \"Sit tight,\" he said. \"Don't try to do anything hasty....\" His remarks were falling on deaf ears\u2014or no ears at all\u2014but the thumb spoke as loudly as words.\n \n There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of presences drawing closer.\n \n Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now, looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks came in all sizes.\n \n A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded out. Retief cocked his head, frowning.\n \n \"Try it two octaves higher,\" he said.\n \n \"Awwrrp! Sorry. Is that better?\" a clear voice came from the darkness.\n \n \"That's fine,\" Retief said. \"I'm here to arrange a prisoner exchange.\"\n \n \"Prisoners? But we have no prisoners.\"\n \n \"Sure you have. Me. Is it a deal?\"\n \n \"Ah, yes, of course. Quite equitable. What guarantees do you require?\"\n \n \"The word of a gentleman is sufficient.\" Retief released the alien. It flopped once, disappeared into the darkness.\n \n \"If you'd care to accompany me to our headquarters,\" the voice said,\n\"we can discuss our mutual concerns in comfort.\"\n \n \"Delighted.\"\n \n Red lights blinked briefly. Retief glimpsed a gap in the thorny barrier, stepped through it. He followed dim shapes across warm sand to a low cave-like entry, faintly lit with a reddish glow.\n \n \"I must apologize for the awkward design of our comfort-dome,\" said the voice. \"Had we known we would be honored by a visit\u2014\"\n \n \"Think nothing of it,\" Retief said. \"We diplomats are trained to crawl.\"\n \n Inside, with knees bent and head ducked under the five-foot ceiling, Retief looked around at the walls of pink-toned nacre, a floor like burgundy-colored glass spread with silken rugs and a low table of polished red granite that stretched down the center of the spacious room, set out with silver dishes and rose-crystal drinking-tubes.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \"Let me congratulate you,\" the voice said.\n \n Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings, rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n\"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can avoid it.\"\n \n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns.\"\n \n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red Tape,\" Retief added.\n \n \"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room, communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n \n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n \n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau d'Yquem.\n \n \"It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here,\" said Hoshick. \"I confess at first we took you for an indigenous earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion.\" He raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief returned the salute and drank.\n \n \"Of course,\" Hoshick continued, \"as soon as we realized that you were sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate show. Or so I hope.\"\n \n \"Additional skirmishers?\" said Retief. \"How many, if you don't mind my asking?\"\n \n \"For the moment, perhaps only a few hundred. There-after ... well, I'm sure we can arrange that between us. Personally I would prefer a contest of limited scope. No nuclear or radiation-effect weapons. Such a bore, screening the spawn for deviations. Though I confess we've come upon some remarkably useful sports. The rangerform such as you made captive, for example. Simple-minded, of course, but a fantastically keen tracker.\"\n \n \"Oh, by all means,\" Retief said. \"No atomics. As you pointed out, spawn-sorting is a nuisance, and then too, it's wasteful of troops.\"\n \n \"Ah, well, they are after all expendable. But we agree: no atomics. Have you tried the ground-gwack eggs? Rather a specialty of my Mosaic....\"\n \n \"Delicious,\" said Retief. \"I wonder. Have you considered eliminating weapons altogether?\"\n \n \n\n \n A scratchy sound issued from the disk. \"Pardon my laughter,\" Hoshick said, \"but surely you jest?\"\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" said Retief, \"we ourselves seldom use weapons.\"\n \n \"I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the use of a weapon by one of your units.\"\n \n \"My apologies,\" said Retief. \"The\u2014ah\u2014the skirmishform failed to recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman.\"\n \n \"Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons....\" Hoshick signaled and the servant refilled tubes.\n \n \"There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned,\" Retief went on. \"I hope you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain specific life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh? Curious. What forms are those?\"\n \n \"Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints.\"\n \n \"Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to point it out.\" Hoshick clucked in dismay. \"I see that skirmishforms are much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception.\" He laughed scratchily. \"Imagine considering us as\u2014what was the word?\u2014varmints.\"\n \n \"Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate. Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to these contests altogether....\"\n \n Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air.\n\"What are you saying?\" he gasped. \"Are you proposing that Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?\"\n \n \"Sir!\" said Retief sternly. \"You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the newest sporting principles.\"\n \n \"New?\" cried Hoshick. \"My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate.\"\n \n \"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n \n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n \n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n \n \"You don't mean...?\"\n \n \"That's right. You and me.\"\n \n \n\n \n Outside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol, followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack retainers were grouped behind him.\n \n \"I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief,\" said Hoshick. He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. \"My spawn-fellows will never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a distance.\"\n \n \"I suggest we use Tennessee rules,\" said Retief. \"They're very liberal. Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as the usual punching, shoving and kicking.\"\n \n \"Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage.\"\n \n \"Of course,\" Retief said, \"if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of contest....\"\n \n \"By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to even it.\"\n \n \"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n \n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\n \n \n\n \n Retief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back. Hoshick nestled closer.\n \n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering weight. Nothing budged.\n \n It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n \n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n \n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice and probed.\n \n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would be a set of ready made hand-holds....\n \n \n\n \n There were.\n \n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on, scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped in terror, then went limp.\n \n Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard. Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily, adjusted the volume.\n \n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n \n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our gougerforms\u2014\"\n \n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a year.\"\n \n \"Speaking of hide-ticks,\" said Retief, \"we've developed a biterform\u2014\"\n \n \"Enough!\" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his hide. \"Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had hoped....\" He broke off, drew a rasping breath. \"I had hoped, Retief,\" he said, speaking sadly now, \"to find a new land here where I might plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms without end. I am shamed before you....\"\n \n \"To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the action from a distance too.\"\n \n \"But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude.\"\n \n \"My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the sand, raising lichens\u2014things like that\u2014\"\n \n \"That on which we dined but now,\" said Hoshick, \"and from which the wine is made.\"\n \n \"The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition. Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll promise to stick to the oases and vegetables.\"\n \n Hoshick curled his back in attention. \"Retief, you're quite serious? You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?\"\n \n \"The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases.\"\n \n Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n \n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29256, "query_start_index": 29258, "query_end_index": 29298, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": " The story begins with Consul Passwyn giving an assignment in a sealed envelope to Vice-Consul Retief, who is a diplomat with the Embassy. His mission is to visit the planet of Adobe and broker a land treaty between the Terrestrial settlers and an invading species, the Jaq. Before Retief leaves, Passwyn stresses the importance of following his orders exactly as written and acknowledges that no one from the Embassy has visited Adobe before, nor do they know the characteristics of the Jaq. Retief gets a ride to Adobe on a mail carrier with the help of a veteran pilot. When the pilot discovers they are entering the planet in the midst of war, he decides to leave on a lifeboat and gives control of the skiff to Retief. Then, Retief crash lands the skiff in order to avoid being blown up by a fission missile that was tracking him on his course. He lands in the middle of an Adoban oasis and immediately encounters a Terrestrial man named Potter, who confuses him for the cousin of one of his associates, Lemuel. Potter tells Retief about his group's history with the Jaqs, whom he refers to as \"Flap-jacks\" due to their wide, flat, tentacled bodies. Along with a team of settlers including Swazey, Lemuel, and Bert, Potter has been spending his days protecting his farms against attacks by the Jaqs after they mistakenly killed one three months prior, having mistaken it for one of the native species. Potter and his team do not trust the Embassy, having heard they are sending a representative to tell them to ceded control of the oases to the Jaqs. When they discover Retief is not Lemuel's cousin, Lemuel confronts Retief, who swiftly establishes his authority by knocking him out cold. When the group senses a Jaq nearby, Retief insists on dealing with the issue by himself. He hunts down the Jaq, they wrestle, and he assumes control by pressing his thumb against the Jaq\u2019s eye hole. The captive Jaq leads Retief to the Jaq headquarters, where he is introduced to their leader, Hoshick. Retief discovers the affability of the species and particularly their penchant for proper sportsmanship. He uses this knowledge to his advantage, and convinces Hoshick that it would be more sportsmanlike to abandon the war efforts and solve their differences through a simple wrestling match. Once again, he wins the match by squeezing his thumb against Hoshick\u2019s eye hole, and he convinces Hoshick to agree to cede control of the entirety of the oases to the Terrestrials and his people would be gifted all of the planets\u2019 desert areas. Upon returning to the Embassy, Retief tells Consul Passwyn the good news and then burns the envelope Passwyn had given him at the beginning of the story."}
{"id": "61146_1", "pid": "61146_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAIN\n \n\n by KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n Retief knew the importance of sealed orders\u2014and the need to keep them that way!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"It's true,\" Consul Passwyn said, \"I requested assignment as principal officer at a small post. But I had in mind one of those charming resort worlds, with only an occasional visa problem, or perhaps a distressed spaceman or two a year. Instead, I'm zoo-keeper to these confounded settlers. And not for one world, mind you, but eight!\" He stared glumly at Vice-Consul Retief.\n \n \"Still,\" Retief said, \"it gives an opportunity to travel\u2014\"\n \n \"Travel!\" the consul barked. \"I hate travel. Here in this backwater system particularly\u2014\" He paused, blinked at Retief and cleared his throat. \"Not that a bit of travel isn't an excellent thing for a junior officer. Marvelous experience.\"\n \n He turned to the wall-screen and pressed a button. A system triagram appeared: eight luminous green dots arranged around a larger disk representing the primary. He picked up a pointer, indicating the innermost planet.\n \n \"The situation on Adobe is nearing crisis. The confounded settlers\u2014a mere handful of them\u2014have managed, as usual, to stir up trouble with an intelligent indigenous life form, the Jaq. I can't think why they bother, merely for a few oases among the endless deserts. However I have, at last, received authorization from Sector Headquarters to take certain action.\" He swung back to face Retief. \"I'm sending you in to handle the situation, Retief\u2014under sealed orders.\" He picked up a fat buff envelope. \"A pity they didn't see fit to order the Terrestrial settlers out weeks ago, as I suggested. Now it is too late. I'm expected to produce a miracle\u2014a rapprochement between Terrestrial and Adoban and a division of territory. It's idiotic. However, failure would look very bad in my record, so I shall expect results.\"\n \n He passed the buff envelope across to Retief.\n \n \"I understood that Adobe was uninhabited,\" Retief said, \"until the Terrestrial settlers arrived.\"\n \n \"Apparently, that was an erroneous impression.\" Passwyn fixed Retief with a watery eye. \"You'll follow your instructions to the letter. In a delicate situation such as this, there must be no impulsive, impromptu element introduced. This approach has been worked out in detail at Sector. You need merely implement it. Is that entirely clear?\"\n \n \"Has anyone at Headquarters ever visited Adobe?\"\n \n \"Of course not. They all hate travel. If there are no other questions, you'd best be on your way. The mail run departs the dome in less than an hour.\"\n \n \"What's this native life form like?\" Retief asked, getting to his feet.\n \n \"When you get back,\" said Passwyn, \"you tell me.\"\n \n \n\n \n The mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen.\n \n \"They's shootin' goin' on down there,\" he said. \"See them white puffs over the edge of the desert?\"\n \n \"I'm supposed to be preventing the war,\" said Retief. \"It looks like I'm a little late.\"\n \n The pilot's head snapped around. \"War?\" he yelped. \"Nobody told me they was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of here.\"\n \n \"Hold on,\" said Retief. \"I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you.\"\n \n \"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n \n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n \n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n \n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n \n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n \n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\"\n \n The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. \"Get in. We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob one this way....\"\n \n Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a heavy old-fashioned power pistol. \"Long as you're goin' in, might as well take this.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. \"I hope you're wrong.\"\n \n \"I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over\u2014one way or another.\"\n \n The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine....\n \n A crimson blip showed on the screen, moving out.\n \n Retief felt sweat pop out on his forehead. The red blip meant heavy radiation from a warhead. Somebody was playing around with an outlawed but by no means unheard of fission weapon. But maybe it was just on a high trajectory and had no connection with the skiff....\n \n Retief altered course to the south. The blip followed.\n \n He checked instrument readings, gripped the controls, watching. This was going to be tricky. The missile bored closer. At five miles Retief threw the light skiff into maximum acceleration, straight toward the oncoming bomb. Crushed back in the padded seat, he watched the screen, correcting course minutely. The proximity fuse should be set for no more than 1000 yards.\n \n At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining harness in the concussion of the explosion ... a mile astern, and harmless.\n \n Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed. Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the ping of hot metal contracting.\n \n \n\n \n Coughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet whined past his ear.\n \n He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left.\n \n He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life, buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped.\n \n Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log. A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving cautiously, a pistol in his hand.\n \n As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him.\n \n They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist\u2014\n \n \"Hey!\" the settler yelled. \"You're as human as I am!\"\n \n \"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea of shooting at me?\"\n \n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin' here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert lay.\n \n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n \n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n \n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't expect\u2014\"\n \n \"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n \n \"Yes. I'm\u2014\"\n \n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014\"\n \n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n \n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you was raised different.\"\n \n \"As a matter of fact\u2014\"\n \n \"Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand up on 'Dobe.\"\n \n Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue blazer and slacks.\n \n \"This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home,\" he said. \"But I guess leather has its points.\"\n \n \"Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown. And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a Flap-jack.\"\n \n \"I won't, but\u2014\"\n \n Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and followed Potter.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"We're damn glad you're here, mister,\" said a fat man with two revolvers belted across his paunch. \"We can use every hand. We're in bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it was fair game. I guess that was the start of it.\" He stirred the fire, added a stick.\n \n \"And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here,\" Potter said. \"Killed two of his cattle, and pulled back.\"\n \n \"I figure they thought the cows were people,\" said Swazey. \"They were out for revenge.\"\n \n \"How could anybody think a cow was folks?\" another man put in. \"They don't look nothin' like\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be so dumb, Bert,\" said Swazey. \"They'd never seen Terries before. They know better now.\"\n \n Bert chuckled. \"Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we, Potter? Got four.\"\n \n \"They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time,\" Swazey said. \"We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and run.\"\n \n \"Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around.\"\n \n \"It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid. But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied men.\"\n \n \"But we're hanging onto our farms,\" said Potter. \"All these oases are old sea-beds\u2014a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em while there's a man alive.\"\n \n \"The whole system needs the food we can raise,\" Bert said. \"These farms we're trying to start won't be enough but they'll help.\"\n \n \"We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory,\" said Potter. \"But you know these Embassy stooges.\"\n \n \"We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks,\" said Swazey. He tightened his mouth. \"We're waitin' for him....\"\n \n \"Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?\" Bert winked at Retief. \"We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory and Verde.\"\n \n \"Shut up, you damn fool!\" a deep voice grated.\n \n \"Lemuel!\" Potter said. \"Nobody else could sneak up on us like that.\"\n \n \"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said, moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather. He eyed Retief.\n \n \"Who's that?\"\n \n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n \n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n \n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\n \n \n\n \n Retief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain\u2014\"\n \n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note against his fringed buckskins.\n \n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"\n \n \"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n \n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n \n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it away.\"\n \n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n \n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n \n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n \n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"\n \n Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes, peered past the fire\u2014\n \n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a split second behind him.\n \n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n \n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n \n \"What's the idea...?\"\n \n \"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\n \n \n\n \n Five minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground. With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an out-cropping of rock.\n \n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet, clambered over the stone\u2014still hot after a day of tropical heat\u2014and moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand, palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n \n He sat down on the ground to wait.\n \n It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be right this time....\n \n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of sand as the Flap-jack charged.\n \n Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping Flap-jack\u2014a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter. It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it was, it seemed more like five hundred.\n \n The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a thumb slip into an orifice\u2014\n \n The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper.\n \n \"Sorry, fellow,\" he muttered between clenched teeth. \"Eye-gouging isn't gentlemanly, but it's effective....\"\n \n The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the thumb dug in.\n \n The alien went limp again, waiting.\n \n \"Now we understand each other,\" said Retief. \"Take me to your leader.\"\n \n \n\n \n Twenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long....\n \n A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off. He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket.\n \n \"Sit tight,\" he said. \"Don't try to do anything hasty....\" His remarks were falling on deaf ears\u2014or no ears at all\u2014but the thumb spoke as loudly as words.\n \n There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of presences drawing closer.\n \n Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now, looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks came in all sizes.\n \n A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded out. Retief cocked his head, frowning.\n \n \"Try it two octaves higher,\" he said.\n \n \"Awwrrp! Sorry. Is that better?\" a clear voice came from the darkness.\n \n \"That's fine,\" Retief said. \"I'm here to arrange a prisoner exchange.\"\n \n \"Prisoners? But we have no prisoners.\"\n \n \"Sure you have. Me. Is it a deal?\"\n \n \"Ah, yes, of course. Quite equitable. What guarantees do you require?\"\n \n \"The word of a gentleman is sufficient.\" Retief released the alien. It flopped once, disappeared into the darkness.\n \n \"If you'd care to accompany me to our headquarters,\" the voice said,\n\"we can discuss our mutual concerns in comfort.\"\n \n \"Delighted.\"\n \n Red lights blinked briefly. Retief glimpsed a gap in the thorny barrier, stepped through it. He followed dim shapes across warm sand to a low cave-like entry, faintly lit with a reddish glow.\n \n \"I must apologize for the awkward design of our comfort-dome,\" said the voice. \"Had we known we would be honored by a visit\u2014\"\n \n \"Think nothing of it,\" Retief said. \"We diplomats are trained to crawl.\"\n \n Inside, with knees bent and head ducked under the five-foot ceiling, Retief looked around at the walls of pink-toned nacre, a floor like burgundy-colored glass spread with silken rugs and a low table of polished red granite that stretched down the center of the spacious room, set out with silver dishes and rose-crystal drinking-tubes.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \"Let me congratulate you,\" the voice said.\n \n Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings, rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n\"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can avoid it.\"\n \n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns.\"\n \n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red Tape,\" Retief added.\n \n \"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room, communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n \n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n \n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau d'Yquem.\n \n \"It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here,\" said Hoshick. \"I confess at first we took you for an indigenous earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion.\" He raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief returned the salute and drank.\n \n \"Of course,\" Hoshick continued, \"as soon as we realized that you were sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate show. Or so I hope.\"\n \n \"Additional skirmishers?\" said Retief. \"How many, if you don't mind my asking?\"\n \n \"For the moment, perhaps only a few hundred. There-after ... well, I'm sure we can arrange that between us. Personally I would prefer a contest of limited scope. No nuclear or radiation-effect weapons. Such a bore, screening the spawn for deviations. Though I confess we've come upon some remarkably useful sports. The rangerform such as you made captive, for example. Simple-minded, of course, but a fantastically keen tracker.\"\n \n \"Oh, by all means,\" Retief said. \"No atomics. As you pointed out, spawn-sorting is a nuisance, and then too, it's wasteful of troops.\"\n \n \"Ah, well, they are after all expendable. But we agree: no atomics. Have you tried the ground-gwack eggs? Rather a specialty of my Mosaic....\"\n \n \"Delicious,\" said Retief. \"I wonder. Have you considered eliminating weapons altogether?\"\n \n \n\n \n A scratchy sound issued from the disk. \"Pardon my laughter,\" Hoshick said, \"but surely you jest?\"\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" said Retief, \"we ourselves seldom use weapons.\"\n \n \"I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the use of a weapon by one of your units.\"\n \n \"My apologies,\" said Retief. \"The\u2014ah\u2014the skirmishform failed to recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman.\"\n \n \"Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons....\" Hoshick signaled and the servant refilled tubes.\n \n \"There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned,\" Retief went on. \"I hope you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain specific life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh? Curious. What forms are those?\"\n \n \"Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints.\"\n \n \"Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to point it out.\" Hoshick clucked in dismay. \"I see that skirmishforms are much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception.\" He laughed scratchily. \"Imagine considering us as\u2014what was the word?\u2014varmints.\"\n \n \"Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate. Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to these contests altogether....\"\n \n Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air.\n\"What are you saying?\" he gasped. \"Are you proposing that Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?\"\n \n \"Sir!\" said Retief sternly. \"You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the newest sporting principles.\"\n \n \"New?\" cried Hoshick. \"My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate.\"\n \n \"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n \n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n \n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n \n \"You don't mean...?\"\n \n \"That's right. You and me.\"\n \n \n\n \n Outside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol, followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack retainers were grouped behind him.\n \n \"I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief,\" said Hoshick. He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. \"My spawn-fellows will never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a distance.\"\n \n \"I suggest we use Tennessee rules,\" said Retief. \"They're very liberal. Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as the usual punching, shoving and kicking.\"\n \n \"Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage.\"\n \n \"Of course,\" Retief said, \"if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of contest....\"\n \n \"By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to even it.\"\n \n \"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n \n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\n \n \n\n \n Retief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back. Hoshick nestled closer.\n \n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering weight. Nothing budged.\n \n It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n \n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n \n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice and probed.\n \n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would be a set of ready made hand-holds....\n \n \n\n \n There were.\n \n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on, scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped in terror, then went limp.\n \n Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard. Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily, adjusted the volume.\n \n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n \n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our gougerforms\u2014\"\n \n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a year.\"\n \n \"Speaking of hide-ticks,\" said Retief, \"we've developed a biterform\u2014\"\n \n \"Enough!\" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his hide. \"Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had hoped....\" He broke off, drew a rasping breath. \"I had hoped, Retief,\" he said, speaking sadly now, \"to find a new land here where I might plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms without end. I am shamed before you....\"\n \n \"To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the action from a distance too.\"\n \n \"But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude.\"\n \n \"My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the sand, raising lichens\u2014things like that\u2014\"\n \n \"That on which we dined but now,\" said Hoshick, \"and from which the wine is made.\"\n \n \"The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition. Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll promise to stick to the oases and vegetables.\"\n \n Hoshick curled his back in attention. \"Retief, you're quite serious? You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?\"\n \n \"The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases.\"\n \n Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n \n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29256, "query_start_index": 29258, "query_end_index": 29298, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Consul Passwyn sends Vice-Consul Retief to Adobe to negotiate a peace deal between the native Jaqs and the human settlers who have moved there. Retief travels to Adobe on the mail ship, but as they near the planet, the pilot points out that there is fighting going on that he can see from fifty miles out; he refuses to land there to deliver Retief but offers Retief the use of the skiff. \n\nAs Retief begins heading toward the planet, he is tracked by a fission weapon. He outmaneuvers the bomb and lands on the planet where he soon encounters one of the settlers. They fight until the man realizes Retief is a human, introduces himself as Potter, and takes Retief to his camp where other men are. The men explain the history of their conflict with the Flap-jacks, saying that one of their men saw one and shot it thinking it was some sort of native game. After that, the Flap-jacks showed up at a farm and killed two cows. Since then, the two sides have been attacking each other back and forth.\n\nLemuel arrives and asks Retief who he is spying for as he pulls a weapon on him. Retief tells him to put the weapon up and then punches Lemuel quickly when he doesn\u2019t. Suddenly, they hear a noise; Retief throws a bucket of water on their fire, and they all dive for cover. Retief then announces he will go out by himself. \n\nAway from the camp, Retief sits and waits until a Flap-jack attacks him. He fights back and struggles but then manages to put his thumb in the creature\u2019s eye, which subdues it. Then he has the creature take him to its leader. In the Flap-jack\u2019s camp, Retief offers himself as a prisoner and is taken to the leader, who introduces himself as Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns. Retief introduces himself as Retief of the Mountain of Red Tape. The two have dinner as Hoshick explains the Flap-jacks' history with the settlers. They think the settlers are sportsmen who enjoy skirmishes, so every time the setters attack them, the Flap-jacks attack back. The Flap-jacks plan to bring in more equipment and skirmishers to match the settlers. Hoshick says he personally prefers a more limited skirmish without nuclear or radiation-effect weapons. \n\nRetief suggests eliminating the weapons and explains that the settlers only use them when they think they are fighting against lower life forms. In further discussion, he learns that the Flap-jacks are worried that the settlers want to take over the deserts they need to grow the lichens they use for their food and wine. The Flap-jacks have no use for the oases. Retief brokers a deal where the Flap-jacks get all the deserts, and the settlers get all the oases.\n\nRetief briefs Passwyn when he returns to Ivory but does not reveal that he never opened the envelope containing his orders.\n"}
{"id": "61146_1", "pid": "61146_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAIN\n \n\n by KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n Retief knew the importance of sealed orders\u2014and the need to keep them that way!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"It's true,\" Consul Passwyn said, \"I requested assignment as principal officer at a small post. But I had in mind one of those charming resort worlds, with only an occasional visa problem, or perhaps a distressed spaceman or two a year. Instead, I'm zoo-keeper to these confounded settlers. And not for one world, mind you, but eight!\" He stared glumly at Vice-Consul Retief.\n \n \"Still,\" Retief said, \"it gives an opportunity to travel\u2014\"\n \n \"Travel!\" the consul barked. \"I hate travel. Here in this backwater system particularly\u2014\" He paused, blinked at Retief and cleared his throat. \"Not that a bit of travel isn't an excellent thing for a junior officer. Marvelous experience.\"\n \n He turned to the wall-screen and pressed a button. A system triagram appeared: eight luminous green dots arranged around a larger disk representing the primary. He picked up a pointer, indicating the innermost planet.\n \n \"The situation on Adobe is nearing crisis. The confounded settlers\u2014a mere handful of them\u2014have managed, as usual, to stir up trouble with an intelligent indigenous life form, the Jaq. I can't think why they bother, merely for a few oases among the endless deserts. However I have, at last, received authorization from Sector Headquarters to take certain action.\" He swung back to face Retief. \"I'm sending you in to handle the situation, Retief\u2014under sealed orders.\" He picked up a fat buff envelope. \"A pity they didn't see fit to order the Terrestrial settlers out weeks ago, as I suggested. Now it is too late. I'm expected to produce a miracle\u2014a rapprochement between Terrestrial and Adoban and a division of territory. It's idiotic. However, failure would look very bad in my record, so I shall expect results.\"\n \n He passed the buff envelope across to Retief.\n \n \"I understood that Adobe was uninhabited,\" Retief said, \"until the Terrestrial settlers arrived.\"\n \n \"Apparently, that was an erroneous impression.\" Passwyn fixed Retief with a watery eye. \"You'll follow your instructions to the letter. In a delicate situation such as this, there must be no impulsive, impromptu element introduced. This approach has been worked out in detail at Sector. You need merely implement it. Is that entirely clear?\"\n \n \"Has anyone at Headquarters ever visited Adobe?\"\n \n \"Of course not. They all hate travel. If there are no other questions, you'd best be on your way. The mail run departs the dome in less than an hour.\"\n \n \"What's this native life form like?\" Retief asked, getting to his feet.\n \n \"When you get back,\" said Passwyn, \"you tell me.\"\n \n \n\n \n The mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen.\n \n \"They's shootin' goin' on down there,\" he said. \"See them white puffs over the edge of the desert?\"\n \n \"I'm supposed to be preventing the war,\" said Retief. \"It looks like I'm a little late.\"\n \n The pilot's head snapped around. \"War?\" he yelped. \"Nobody told me they was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of here.\"\n \n \"Hold on,\" said Retief. \"I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you.\"\n \n \"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n \n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n \n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n \n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n \n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n \n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\"\n \n The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. \"Get in. We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob one this way....\"\n \n Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a heavy old-fashioned power pistol. \"Long as you're goin' in, might as well take this.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. \"I hope you're wrong.\"\n \n \"I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over\u2014one way or another.\"\n \n The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine....\n \n A crimson blip showed on the screen, moving out.\n \n Retief felt sweat pop out on his forehead. The red blip meant heavy radiation from a warhead. Somebody was playing around with an outlawed but by no means unheard of fission weapon. But maybe it was just on a high trajectory and had no connection with the skiff....\n \n Retief altered course to the south. The blip followed.\n \n He checked instrument readings, gripped the controls, watching. This was going to be tricky. The missile bored closer. At five miles Retief threw the light skiff into maximum acceleration, straight toward the oncoming bomb. Crushed back in the padded seat, he watched the screen, correcting course minutely. The proximity fuse should be set for no more than 1000 yards.\n \n At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining harness in the concussion of the explosion ... a mile astern, and harmless.\n \n Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed. Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the ping of hot metal contracting.\n \n \n\n \n Coughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet whined past his ear.\n \n He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left.\n \n He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life, buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped.\n \n Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log. A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving cautiously, a pistol in his hand.\n \n As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him.\n \n They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist\u2014\n \n \"Hey!\" the settler yelled. \"You're as human as I am!\"\n \n \"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea of shooting at me?\"\n \n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin' here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert lay.\n \n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n \n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n \n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't expect\u2014\"\n \n \"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n \n \"Yes. I'm\u2014\"\n \n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014\"\n \n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n \n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you was raised different.\"\n \n \"As a matter of fact\u2014\"\n \n \"Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand up on 'Dobe.\"\n \n Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue blazer and slacks.\n \n \"This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home,\" he said. \"But I guess leather has its points.\"\n \n \"Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown. And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a Flap-jack.\"\n \n \"I won't, but\u2014\"\n \n Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and followed Potter.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"We're damn glad you're here, mister,\" said a fat man with two revolvers belted across his paunch. \"We can use every hand. We're in bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it was fair game. I guess that was the start of it.\" He stirred the fire, added a stick.\n \n \"And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here,\" Potter said. \"Killed two of his cattle, and pulled back.\"\n \n \"I figure they thought the cows were people,\" said Swazey. \"They were out for revenge.\"\n \n \"How could anybody think a cow was folks?\" another man put in. \"They don't look nothin' like\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be so dumb, Bert,\" said Swazey. \"They'd never seen Terries before. They know better now.\"\n \n Bert chuckled. \"Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we, Potter? Got four.\"\n \n \"They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time,\" Swazey said. \"We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and run.\"\n \n \"Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around.\"\n \n \"It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid. But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied men.\"\n \n \"But we're hanging onto our farms,\" said Potter. \"All these oases are old sea-beds\u2014a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em while there's a man alive.\"\n \n \"The whole system needs the food we can raise,\" Bert said. \"These farms we're trying to start won't be enough but they'll help.\"\n \n \"We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory,\" said Potter. \"But you know these Embassy stooges.\"\n \n \"We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks,\" said Swazey. He tightened his mouth. \"We're waitin' for him....\"\n \n \"Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?\" Bert winked at Retief. \"We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory and Verde.\"\n \n \"Shut up, you damn fool!\" a deep voice grated.\n \n \"Lemuel!\" Potter said. \"Nobody else could sneak up on us like that.\"\n \n \"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said, moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather. He eyed Retief.\n \n \"Who's that?\"\n \n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n \n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n \n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\n \n \n\n \n Retief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain\u2014\"\n \n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note against his fringed buckskins.\n \n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"\n \n \"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n \n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n \n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it away.\"\n \n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n \n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n \n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n \n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"\n \n Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes, peered past the fire\u2014\n \n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a split second behind him.\n \n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n \n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n \n \"What's the idea...?\"\n \n \"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\n \n \n\n \n Five minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground. With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an out-cropping of rock.\n \n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet, clambered over the stone\u2014still hot after a day of tropical heat\u2014and moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand, palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n \n He sat down on the ground to wait.\n \n It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be right this time....\n \n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of sand as the Flap-jack charged.\n \n Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping Flap-jack\u2014a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter. It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it was, it seemed more like five hundred.\n \n The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a thumb slip into an orifice\u2014\n \n The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper.\n \n \"Sorry, fellow,\" he muttered between clenched teeth. \"Eye-gouging isn't gentlemanly, but it's effective....\"\n \n The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the thumb dug in.\n \n The alien went limp again, waiting.\n \n \"Now we understand each other,\" said Retief. \"Take me to your leader.\"\n \n \n\n \n Twenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long....\n \n A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off. He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket.\n \n \"Sit tight,\" he said. \"Don't try to do anything hasty....\" His remarks were falling on deaf ears\u2014or no ears at all\u2014but the thumb spoke as loudly as words.\n \n There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of presences drawing closer.\n \n Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now, looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks came in all sizes.\n \n A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded out. Retief cocked his head, frowning.\n \n \"Try it two octaves higher,\" he said.\n \n \"Awwrrp! Sorry. Is that better?\" a clear voice came from the darkness.\n \n \"That's fine,\" Retief said. \"I'm here to arrange a prisoner exchange.\"\n \n \"Prisoners? But we have no prisoners.\"\n \n \"Sure you have. Me. Is it a deal?\"\n \n \"Ah, yes, of course. Quite equitable. What guarantees do you require?\"\n \n \"The word of a gentleman is sufficient.\" Retief released the alien. It flopped once, disappeared into the darkness.\n \n \"If you'd care to accompany me to our headquarters,\" the voice said,\n\"we can discuss our mutual concerns in comfort.\"\n \n \"Delighted.\"\n \n Red lights blinked briefly. Retief glimpsed a gap in the thorny barrier, stepped through it. He followed dim shapes across warm sand to a low cave-like entry, faintly lit with a reddish glow.\n \n \"I must apologize for the awkward design of our comfort-dome,\" said the voice. \"Had we known we would be honored by a visit\u2014\"\n \n \"Think nothing of it,\" Retief said. \"We diplomats are trained to crawl.\"\n \n Inside, with knees bent and head ducked under the five-foot ceiling, Retief looked around at the walls of pink-toned nacre, a floor like burgundy-colored glass spread with silken rugs and a low table of polished red granite that stretched down the center of the spacious room, set out with silver dishes and rose-crystal drinking-tubes.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \"Let me congratulate you,\" the voice said.\n \n Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings, rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n\"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can avoid it.\"\n \n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns.\"\n \n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red Tape,\" Retief added.\n \n \"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room, communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n \n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n \n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau d'Yquem.\n \n \"It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here,\" said Hoshick. \"I confess at first we took you for an indigenous earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion.\" He raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief returned the salute and drank.\n \n \"Of course,\" Hoshick continued, \"as soon as we realized that you were sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate show. Or so I hope.\"\n \n \"Additional skirmishers?\" said Retief. \"How many, if you don't mind my asking?\"\n \n \"For the moment, perhaps only a few hundred. There-after ... well, I'm sure we can arrange that between us. Personally I would prefer a contest of limited scope. No nuclear or radiation-effect weapons. Such a bore, screening the spawn for deviations. Though I confess we've come upon some remarkably useful sports. The rangerform such as you made captive, for example. Simple-minded, of course, but a fantastically keen tracker.\"\n \n \"Oh, by all means,\" Retief said. \"No atomics. As you pointed out, spawn-sorting is a nuisance, and then too, it's wasteful of troops.\"\n \n \"Ah, well, they are after all expendable. But we agree: no atomics. Have you tried the ground-gwack eggs? Rather a specialty of my Mosaic....\"\n \n \"Delicious,\" said Retief. \"I wonder. Have you considered eliminating weapons altogether?\"\n \n \n\n \n A scratchy sound issued from the disk. \"Pardon my laughter,\" Hoshick said, \"but surely you jest?\"\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" said Retief, \"we ourselves seldom use weapons.\"\n \n \"I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the use of a weapon by one of your units.\"\n \n \"My apologies,\" said Retief. \"The\u2014ah\u2014the skirmishform failed to recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman.\"\n \n \"Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons....\" Hoshick signaled and the servant refilled tubes.\n \n \"There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned,\" Retief went on. \"I hope you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain specific life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh? Curious. What forms are those?\"\n \n \"Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints.\"\n \n \"Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to point it out.\" Hoshick clucked in dismay. \"I see that skirmishforms are much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception.\" He laughed scratchily. \"Imagine considering us as\u2014what was the word?\u2014varmints.\"\n \n \"Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate. Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to these contests altogether....\"\n \n Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air.\n\"What are you saying?\" he gasped. \"Are you proposing that Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?\"\n \n \"Sir!\" said Retief sternly. \"You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the newest sporting principles.\"\n \n \"New?\" cried Hoshick. \"My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate.\"\n \n \"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n \n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n \n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n \n \"You don't mean...?\"\n \n \"That's right. You and me.\"\n \n \n\n \n Outside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol, followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack retainers were grouped behind him.\n \n \"I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief,\" said Hoshick. He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. \"My spawn-fellows will never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a distance.\"\n \n \"I suggest we use Tennessee rules,\" said Retief. \"They're very liberal. Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as the usual punching, shoving and kicking.\"\n \n \"Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage.\"\n \n \"Of course,\" Retief said, \"if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of contest....\"\n \n \"By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to even it.\"\n \n \"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n \n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\n \n \n\n \n Retief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back. Hoshick nestled closer.\n \n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering weight. Nothing budged.\n \n It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n \n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n \n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice and probed.\n \n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would be a set of ready made hand-holds....\n \n \n\n \n There were.\n \n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on, scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped in terror, then went limp.\n \n Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard. Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily, adjusted the volume.\n \n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n \n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our gougerforms\u2014\"\n \n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a year.\"\n \n \"Speaking of hide-ticks,\" said Retief, \"we've developed a biterform\u2014\"\n \n \"Enough!\" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his hide. \"Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had hoped....\" He broke off, drew a rasping breath. \"I had hoped, Retief,\" he said, speaking sadly now, \"to find a new land here where I might plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms without end. I am shamed before you....\"\n \n \"To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the action from a distance too.\"\n \n \"But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude.\"\n \n \"My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the sand, raising lichens\u2014things like that\u2014\"\n \n \"That on which we dined but now,\" said Hoshick, \"and from which the wine is made.\"\n \n \"The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition. Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll promise to stick to the oases and vegetables.\"\n \n Hoshick curled his back in attention. \"Retief, you're quite serious? You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?\"\n \n \"The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases.\"\n \n Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n \n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29256, "query_start_index": 29258, "query_end_index": 29298, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A Vice-Consul named Retief is sent to the planet Adobe to settle a dispute between the human settlers there and an indigenous species called the Jaq. He is given a thick envelope of instructions by his superior, Consul Passwyn, who tells him to follow them to the letter with no improvisation. Passwyn makes it clear that he thinks it will take a miracle to pull this mission off, but still tells Retief that he expects results. \n\nRetief lands on Adobe under arduous circumstances, during which his pilot bails out of the plane, he narrowly misses an atomic fission weapon, and he is immediately shot at upon landing. The shooter turns out to be Potter, a human who mistook Retief for a Jaq (or, as the human settlers refer to them, a \u201cflap-jack\u201d). He now assumes that Retief is the cousin of someone called \u201cLemuel\u201d, and brings him back to the other humans without letting Retief clarify his real identity. \n\nThe other humans are glad to see him, thinking he\u2019s a reinforcement. They tell him that they\u2019ve been engaged in back-and-forth raids with the Flap-jacks, and also that they\u2019ve heard that a bureaucrat is coming to talk them out of the dispute. Lemuel enters and reveals that Retief is not his cousin. He asks Retief who he is spying for and threatens him, at which time Retief easily subdues him in 1-2 punches, much to the awe of the other humans.\n\nRetief senses something outside and insists on looking into it alone. He hides and waits for a Jaq to attack him, and he subdues it by gouging its eye. He asks to see its leader, and is brought to the Jaq headquarters to dine and meet with Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns. \n\nRetief and Hoshick eat and discuss how best to conduct next steps in the ongoing battle between the Jaq and the human settlers, of whom Hoshick seems to assume Retief is the leader. They discuss banning certain weapons, until Retief eventually gets Hoshick to agree to combat between the two of them. After discussing a few rules,  they commence to fight. Hoshick does well until Retief manages to gouge him until he goes limp. \n\nAfterward, Retief asks Hoshick if he would consider giving the human settlers the oases and vegetables on the planet if the humans would let the Jaq have all the desert areas. Hoshick likes the idea. \n\nRetief goes back to the human camp, gives them some wine and offers the same deal. They are equally happy to take the oases and give up the desert. \n\nWe then find Retief back with Consul Passwyn, who is shocked at the success of the mission. Passwyn, who never seems to give praise where it is actually due, says it\u2019s a good lesson about how things go when you follow instructions exactly. After Retief leaves the office, he tosses the envelope of instructions into the trash, still unopened. \n"}
{"id": "61146_1", "pid": "61146_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nRETIEF OF THE RED-TAPE MOUNTAIN\n \n\n by KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n Retief knew the importance of sealed orders\u2014and the need to keep them that way!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \"It's true,\" Consul Passwyn said, \"I requested assignment as principal officer at a small post. But I had in mind one of those charming resort worlds, with only an occasional visa problem, or perhaps a distressed spaceman or two a year. Instead, I'm zoo-keeper to these confounded settlers. And not for one world, mind you, but eight!\" He stared glumly at Vice-Consul Retief.\n \n \"Still,\" Retief said, \"it gives an opportunity to travel\u2014\"\n \n \"Travel!\" the consul barked. \"I hate travel. Here in this backwater system particularly\u2014\" He paused, blinked at Retief and cleared his throat. \"Not that a bit of travel isn't an excellent thing for a junior officer. Marvelous experience.\"\n \n He turned to the wall-screen and pressed a button. A system triagram appeared: eight luminous green dots arranged around a larger disk representing the primary. He picked up a pointer, indicating the innermost planet.\n \n \"The situation on Adobe is nearing crisis. The confounded settlers\u2014a mere handful of them\u2014have managed, as usual, to stir up trouble with an intelligent indigenous life form, the Jaq. I can't think why they bother, merely for a few oases among the endless deserts. However I have, at last, received authorization from Sector Headquarters to take certain action.\" He swung back to face Retief. \"I'm sending you in to handle the situation, Retief\u2014under sealed orders.\" He picked up a fat buff envelope. \"A pity they didn't see fit to order the Terrestrial settlers out weeks ago, as I suggested. Now it is too late. I'm expected to produce a miracle\u2014a rapprochement between Terrestrial and Adoban and a division of territory. It's idiotic. However, failure would look very bad in my record, so I shall expect results.\"\n \n He passed the buff envelope across to Retief.\n \n \"I understood that Adobe was uninhabited,\" Retief said, \"until the Terrestrial settlers arrived.\"\n \n \"Apparently, that was an erroneous impression.\" Passwyn fixed Retief with a watery eye. \"You'll follow your instructions to the letter. In a delicate situation such as this, there must be no impulsive, impromptu element introduced. This approach has been worked out in detail at Sector. You need merely implement it. Is that entirely clear?\"\n \n \"Has anyone at Headquarters ever visited Adobe?\"\n \n \"Of course not. They all hate travel. If there are no other questions, you'd best be on your way. The mail run departs the dome in less than an hour.\"\n \n \"What's this native life form like?\" Retief asked, getting to his feet.\n \n \"When you get back,\" said Passwyn, \"you tell me.\"\n \n \n\n \n The mail pilot, a leathery veteran with quarter-inch whiskers, spat toward a stained corner of the compartment, leaned close to the screen.\n \n \"They's shootin' goin' on down there,\" he said. \"See them white puffs over the edge of the desert?\"\n \n \"I'm supposed to be preventing the war,\" said Retief. \"It looks like I'm a little late.\"\n \n The pilot's head snapped around. \"War?\" he yelped. \"Nobody told me they was a war goin' on on 'Dobe. If that's what that is, I'm gettin' out of here.\"\n \n \"Hold on,\" said Retief. \"I've got to get down. They won't shoot at you.\"\n \n \"They shore won't, sonny. I ain't givin' 'em the chance.\" He started punching keys on the console. Retief reached out, caught his wrist.\n \n \"Maybe you didn't hear me. I said I've got to get down.\"\n \n The pilot plunged against the restraint, swung a punch that Retief blocked casually. \"Are you nuts?\" the pilot screeched. \"They's plenty shootin' goin' on fer me to see it fifty miles out.\"\n \n \"The mail must go through, you know.\"\n \n \"Okay! You're so dead set on gettin' killed, you take the skiff. I'll tell 'em to pick up the remains next trip.\"\n \n \"You're a pal. I'll take your offer.\"\n \n The pilot jumped to the lifeboat hatch and cycled it open. \"Get in. We're closin' fast. Them birds might take it into their heads to lob one this way....\"\n \n Retief crawled into the narrow cockpit of the skiff, glanced over the controls. The pilot ducked out of sight, came back, handed Retief a heavy old-fashioned power pistol. \"Long as you're goin' in, might as well take this.\"\n \n \"Thanks.\" Retief shoved the pistol in his belt. \"I hope you're wrong.\"\n \n \"I'll see they pick you up when the shootin's over\u2014one way or another.\"\n \n The hatch clanked shut. A moment later there was a jar as the skiff dropped away, followed by heavy buffeting in the backwash from the departing mail boat. Retief watched the tiny screen, hands on the manual controls. He was dropping rapidly: forty miles, thirty-nine....\n \n A crimson blip showed on the screen, moving out.\n \n Retief felt sweat pop out on his forehead. The red blip meant heavy radiation from a warhead. Somebody was playing around with an outlawed but by no means unheard of fission weapon. But maybe it was just on a high trajectory and had no connection with the skiff....\n \n Retief altered course to the south. The blip followed.\n \n He checked instrument readings, gripped the controls, watching. This was going to be tricky. The missile bored closer. At five miles Retief threw the light skiff into maximum acceleration, straight toward the oncoming bomb. Crushed back in the padded seat, he watched the screen, correcting course minutely. The proximity fuse should be set for no more than 1000 yards.\n \n At a combined speed of two miles per second, the skiff flashed past the missile, and Retief was slammed violently against the restraining harness in the concussion of the explosion ... a mile astern, and harmless.\n \n Then the planetary surface was rushing up with frightening speed. Retief shook his head, kicked in the emergency retro-drive. Points of light arced up from the planet face below. If they were ordinary chemical warheads the skiff's meteor screens should handle them. The screen flashed brilliant white, then went dark. The skiff flipped on its back. Smoke filled the tiny compartment. There was a series of shocks, a final bone-shaking concussion, then stillness, broken by the ping of hot metal contracting.\n \n \n\n \n Coughing, Retief disengaged himself from the shock-webbing. He beat out sparks in his lap, groped underfoot for the hatch and wrenched it open. A wave of hot jungle air struck him. He lowered himself to a bed of shattered foliage, got to his feet ... and dropped flat as a bullet whined past his ear.\n \n He lay listening. Stealthy movements were audible from the left.\n \n He inched his way to the shelter of a broad-boled dwarf tree. Somewhere a song lizard burbled. Whining insects circled, scented alien life, buzzed off. There was another rustle of foliage from the underbrush five yards away. A bush quivered, then a low bough dipped.\n \n Retief edged back around the trunk, eased down behind a fallen log. A stocky man in grimy leather shirt and shorts appeared, moving cautiously, a pistol in his hand.\n \n As he passed, Retief rose, leaped the log and tackled him.\n \n They went down together. The stranger gave one short yell, then struggled in silence. Retief flipped him onto his back, raised a fist\u2014\n \n \"Hey!\" the settler yelled. \"You're as human as I am!\"\n \n \"Maybe I'll look better after a shave,\" said Retief. \"What's the idea of shooting at me?\"\n \n \"Lemme up. My name's Potter. Sorry 'bout that. I figured it was a Flap-jack boat; looks just like 'em. I took a shot when I saw something move. Didn't know it was a Terrestrial. Who are you? What you doin' here? We're pretty close to the edge of the oases. That's Flap-jack country over there.\" He waved a hand toward the north, where the desert lay.\n \n \"I'm glad you're a poor shot. That missile was too close for comfort.\"\n \n \"Missile, eh? Must be Flap-jack artillery. We got nothing like that.\"\n \n \"I heard there was a full-fledged war brewing,\" said Retief. \"I didn't expect\u2014\"\n \n \"Good!\" Potter said. \"We figured a few of you boys from Ivory would be joining up when you heard. You are from Ivory?\"\n \n \"Yes. I'm\u2014\"\n \n \"Hey, you must be Lemuel's cousin. Good night! I pretty near made a bad mistake. Lemuel's a tough man to explain something to.\"\n \n \"I'm\u2014\"\n \n \"Keep your head down. These damn Flap-jacks have got some wicked hand weapons. Come on....\" He moved off silently on all fours. Retief followed. They crossed two hundred yards of rough country before Potter got to his feet, took out a soggy bandana and mopped his face.\n \n \"You move good for a city man. I thought you folks on Ivory just sat under those domes and read dials. But I guess bein' Lemuel's cousin you was raised different.\"\n \n \"As a matter of fact\u2014\"\n \n \"Have to get you some real clothes, though. Those city duds don't stand up on 'Dobe.\"\n \n Retief looked down at the charred, torn and sweat-soaked powder-blue blazer and slacks.\n \n \"This outfit seemed pretty rough-and-ready back home,\" he said. \"But I guess leather has its points.\"\n \n \"Let's get on back to camp. We'll just about make it by sundown. And, look. Don't say anything to Lemuel about me thinking you were a Flap-jack.\"\n \n \"I won't, but\u2014\"\n \n Potter was on his way, loping off up a gentle slope. Retief pulled off the sodden blazer, dropped it over a bush, added his string tie and followed Potter.\n \n \n\n II\n \n \"We're damn glad you're here, mister,\" said a fat man with two revolvers belted across his paunch. \"We can use every hand. We're in bad shape. We ran into the Flap-jacks three months ago and we haven't made a smart move since. First, we thought they were a native form we hadn't run into before. Fact is, one of the boys shot one, thinkin' it was fair game. I guess that was the start of it.\" He stirred the fire, added a stick.\n \n \"And then a bunch of 'em hit Swazey's farm here,\" Potter said. \"Killed two of his cattle, and pulled back.\"\n \n \"I figure they thought the cows were people,\" said Swazey. \"They were out for revenge.\"\n \n \"How could anybody think a cow was folks?\" another man put in. \"They don't look nothin' like\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be so dumb, Bert,\" said Swazey. \"They'd never seen Terries before. They know better now.\"\n \n Bert chuckled. \"Sure do. We showed 'em the next time, didn't we, Potter? Got four.\"\n \n \"They walked right up to my place a couple days after the first time,\" Swazey said. \"We were ready for 'em. Peppered 'em good. They cut and run.\"\n \n \"Flopped, you mean. Ugliest lookin' critters you ever saw. Look just like a old piece of dirty blanket humpin' around.\"\n \n \"It's been goin' on this way ever since. They raid and then we raid. But lately they've been bringing some big stuff into it. They've got some kind of pint-sized airships and automatic rifles. We've lost four men now and a dozen more in the freezer, waiting for the med ship. We can't afford it. The colony's got less than three hundred able-bodied men.\"\n \n \"But we're hanging onto our farms,\" said Potter. \"All these oases are old sea-beds\u2014a mile deep, solid topsoil. And there's a couple of hundred others we haven't touched yet. The Flap-jacks won't get 'em while there's a man alive.\"\n \n \"The whole system needs the food we can raise,\" Bert said. \"These farms we're trying to start won't be enough but they'll help.\"\n \n \"We been yellin' for help to the CDT, over on Ivory,\" said Potter. \"But you know these Embassy stooges.\"\n \n \"We heard they were sending some kind of bureaucrat in here to tell us to get out and give the oases to the Flap-jacks,\" said Swazey. He tightened his mouth. \"We're waitin' for him....\"\n \n \"Meanwhile we got reinforcements comin' up, eh, boys?\" Bert winked at Retief. \"We put out the word back home. We all got relatives on Ivory and Verde.\"\n \n \"Shut up, you damn fool!\" a deep voice grated.\n \n \"Lemuel!\" Potter said. \"Nobody else could sneak up on us like that.\"\n \n \"If I'd a been a Flap-jack; I'd of et you alive,\" the newcomer said, moving into the ring of fire, a tall, broad-faced man in grimy leather. He eyed Retief.\n \n \"Who's that?\"\n \n \"What do ya mean?\" Potter spoke in the silence. \"He's your cousin....\"\n \n \"He ain't no cousin of mine,\" Lemuel said slowly. He stepped to Retief.\n \n \"Who you spyin' for, stranger?\" he rasped.\n \n \n\n \n Retief got to his feet. \"I think I should explain\u2014\"\n \n A short-nosed automatic appeared in Lemuel's hand, a clashing note against his fringed buckskins.\n \n \"Skip the talk. I know a fink when I see one.\"\n \n \"Just for a change, I'd like to finish a sentence,\" said Retief. \"And I suggest you put your courage back in your pocket before it bites you.\"\n \n \"You talk too damned fancy to suit me.\"\n \n \"Maybe. But I'm talking to suit me. Now, for the last time, put it away.\"\n \n Lemuel stared at Retief. \"You givin' me orders...?\"\n \n Retief's left fist shot out, smacked Lemuel's face dead center. He stumbled back, blood starting from his nose; the pistol fired into the dirt as he dropped it. He caught himself, jumped for Retief ... and met a straight right that snapped him onto his back: out cold.\n \n \"Wow!\" said Potter. \"The stranger took Lem ... in two punches!\"\n \n \"One,\" said Swazey. \"That first one was just a love tap.\"\n \n Bert froze. \"Hark, boys,\" he whispered. In the sudden silence a night lizard called. Retief strained, heard nothing. He narrowed his eyes, peered past the fire\u2014\n \n With a swift lunge he seized up the bucket of drinking water, dashed it over the fire, threw himself flat. He heard the others hit the dirt a split second behind him.\n \n \"You move fast for a city man,\" breathed Swazey beside him. \"You see pretty good too. We'll split and take 'em from two sides. You and Bert from the left, me and Potter from the right.\"\n \n \"No,\" said Retief. \"You wait here. I'm going out alone.\"\n \n \"What's the idea...?\"\n \n \"Later. Sit tight and keep your eyes open.\" Retief took a bearing on a treetop faintly visible against the sky and started forward.\n \n \n\n \n Five minutes' stealthy progress brought him to a slight rise of ground. With infinite caution he raised himself, risking a glance over an out-cropping of rock.\n \n The stunted trees ended just ahead. Beyond, he could make out the dim contour of rolling desert. Flap-jack country. He got to his feet, clambered over the stone\u2014still hot after a day of tropical heat\u2014and moved forward twenty yards. Around him he saw nothing but drifted sand, palely visible in the starlight, and the occasional shadow of jutting shale slabs. Behind him the jungle was still.\n \n He sat down on the ground to wait.\n \n It was ten minutes before a movement caught his eye. Something had separated itself from a dark mass of stone, glided across a few yards of open ground to another shelter. Retief watched. Minutes passed. The shape moved again, slipped into a shadow ten feet distant. Retief felt the butt of the power pistol with his elbow. His guess had better be right this time....\n \n There was a sudden rasp, like leather against concrete, and a flurry of sand as the Flap-jack charged.\n \n Retief rolled aside, then lunged, threw his weight on the flopping Flap-jack\u2014a yard square, three inches thick at the center and all muscle. The ray-like creature heaved up, curled backward, its edge rippling, to stand on the flattened rim of its encircling sphincter. It scrabbled with prehensile fringe-tentacles for a grip on Retief's shoulders. He wrapped his arms around the alien and struggled to his feet. The thing was heavy. A hundred pounds at least. Fighting as it was, it seemed more like five hundred.\n \n The Flap-jack reversed its tactics, went limp. Retief grabbed, felt a thumb slip into an orifice\u2014\n \n The alien went wild. Retief hung on, dug the thumb in deeper.\n \n \"Sorry, fellow,\" he muttered between clenched teeth. \"Eye-gouging isn't gentlemanly, but it's effective....\"\n \n The Flap-jack fell still, only its fringes rippling slowly. Retief relaxed the pressure of his thumb; the alien gave a tentative jerk; the thumb dug in.\n \n The alien went limp again, waiting.\n \n \"Now we understand each other,\" said Retief. \"Take me to your leader.\"\n \n \n\n \n Twenty minutes' walk into the desert brought Retief to a low rampart of thorn branches: the Flap-jacks' outer defensive line against Terry forays. It would be as good a place as any to wait for the move by the Flap-jacks. He sat down and eased the weight of his captive off his back, but kept a firm thumb in place. If his analysis of the situation was correct, a Flap-jack picket should be along before too long....\n \n A penetrating beam of red light struck Retief in the face, blinked off. He got to his feet. The captive Flap-jack rippled its fringe in an agitated way. Retief tensed his thumb in the eye-socket.\n \n \"Sit tight,\" he said. \"Don't try to do anything hasty....\" His remarks were falling on deaf ears\u2014or no ears at all\u2014but the thumb spoke as loudly as words.\n \n There was a slither of sand. Another. He became aware of a ring of presences drawing closer.\n \n Retief tightened his grip on the alien. He could see a dark shape now, looming up almost to his own six-three. It looked like the Flap-jacks came in all sizes.\n \n A low rumble sounded, like a deep-throated growl. It strummed on, faded out. Retief cocked his head, frowning.\n \n \"Try it two octaves higher,\" he said.\n \n \"Awwrrp! Sorry. Is that better?\" a clear voice came from the darkness.\n \n \"That's fine,\" Retief said. \"I'm here to arrange a prisoner exchange.\"\n \n \"Prisoners? But we have no prisoners.\"\n \n \"Sure you have. Me. Is it a deal?\"\n \n \"Ah, yes, of course. Quite equitable. What guarantees do you require?\"\n \n \"The word of a gentleman is sufficient.\" Retief released the alien. It flopped once, disappeared into the darkness.\n \n \"If you'd care to accompany me to our headquarters,\" the voice said,\n\"we can discuss our mutual concerns in comfort.\"\n \n \"Delighted.\"\n \n Red lights blinked briefly. Retief glimpsed a gap in the thorny barrier, stepped through it. He followed dim shapes across warm sand to a low cave-like entry, faintly lit with a reddish glow.\n \n \"I must apologize for the awkward design of our comfort-dome,\" said the voice. \"Had we known we would be honored by a visit\u2014\"\n \n \"Think nothing of it,\" Retief said. \"We diplomats are trained to crawl.\"\n \n Inside, with knees bent and head ducked under the five-foot ceiling, Retief looked around at the walls of pink-toned nacre, a floor like burgundy-colored glass spread with silken rugs and a low table of polished red granite that stretched down the center of the spacious room, set out with silver dishes and rose-crystal drinking-tubes.\n \n \n\n III\n \n \"Let me congratulate you,\" the voice said.\n \n Retief turned. An immense Flap-jack, hung with crimson trappings, rippled at his side. The voice issued from a disk strapped to its back.\n\"You fight well. I think we will find in each other worthy adversaries.\"\n \n \"Thanks. I'm sure the test would be interesting, but I'm hoping we can avoid it.\"\n \n \"Avoid it?\" Retief heard a low humming coming from the speaker in the silence. \"Well, let us dine,\" the mighty Flap-jack said at last. \"We can resolve these matters later. I am called Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns.\"\n \n \"I'm Retief.\" Hoshick waited expectantly, \"... of the Mountain of Red Tape,\" Retief added.\n \n \"Take place, Retief,\" said Hoshick. \"I hope you won't find our rude couches uncomfortable.\" Two other large Flap-jacks came into the room, communed silently with Hoshick. \"Pray forgive our lack of translating devices,\" he said to Retief. \"Permit me to introduce my colleagues....\"\n \n A small Flap-jack rippled the chamber bearing on its back a silver tray laden with aromatic food. The waiter served the four diners, filled the drinking tubes with yellow wine. It smelled good.\n \n \"I trust you'll find these dishes palatable,\" said Hoshick. \"Our metabolisms are much alike, I believe.\" Retief tried the food. It had a delicious nut-like flavor. The wine was indistinguishable from Chateau d'Yquem.\n \n \"It was an unexpected pleasure to encounter your party here,\" said Hoshick. \"I confess at first we took you for an indigenous earth-grubbing form, but we were soon disabused of that notion.\" He raised a tube, manipulating it deftly with his fringe tentacles. Retief returned the salute and drank.\n \n \"Of course,\" Hoshick continued, \"as soon as we realized that you were sportsmen like ourselves, we attempted to make amends by providing a bit of activity for you. We've ordered out our heavier equipment and a few trained skirmishers and soon we'll be able to give you an adequate show. Or so I hope.\"\n \n \"Additional skirmishers?\" said Retief. \"How many, if you don't mind my asking?\"\n \n \"For the moment, perhaps only a few hundred. There-after ... well, I'm sure we can arrange that between us. Personally I would prefer a contest of limited scope. No nuclear or radiation-effect weapons. Such a bore, screening the spawn for deviations. Though I confess we've come upon some remarkably useful sports. The rangerform such as you made captive, for example. Simple-minded, of course, but a fantastically keen tracker.\"\n \n \"Oh, by all means,\" Retief said. \"No atomics. As you pointed out, spawn-sorting is a nuisance, and then too, it's wasteful of troops.\"\n \n \"Ah, well, they are after all expendable. But we agree: no atomics. Have you tried the ground-gwack eggs? Rather a specialty of my Mosaic....\"\n \n \"Delicious,\" said Retief. \"I wonder. Have you considered eliminating weapons altogether?\"\n \n \n\n \n A scratchy sound issued from the disk. \"Pardon my laughter,\" Hoshick said, \"but surely you jest?\"\n \n \"As a matter of fact,\" said Retief, \"we ourselves seldom use weapons.\"\n \n \"I seem to recall that our first contact of skirmishforms involved the use of a weapon by one of your units.\"\n \n \"My apologies,\" said Retief. \"The\u2014ah\u2014the skirmishform failed to recognize that he was dealing with a sportsman.\"\n \n \"Still, now that we have commenced so merrily with weapons....\" Hoshick signaled and the servant refilled tubes.\n \n \"There is an aspect I haven't yet mentioned,\" Retief went on. \"I hope you won't take this personally, but the fact is, our skirmishforms think of weapons as something one employs only in dealing with certain specific life-forms.\"\n \n \"Oh? Curious. What forms are those?\"\n \n \"Vermin. Or 'varmints' as some call them. Deadly antagonists, but lacking in caste. I don't want our skirmishforms thinking of such worthy adversaries as yourself as varmints.\"\n \n \"Dear me! I hadn't realized, of course. Most considerate of you to point it out.\" Hoshick clucked in dismay. \"I see that skirmishforms are much the same among you as with us: lacking in perception.\" He laughed scratchily. \"Imagine considering us as\u2014what was the word?\u2014varmints.\"\n \n \"Which brings us to the crux of the matter. You see, we're up against a serious problem with regard to skirmishforms. A low birth rate. Therefore we've reluctantly taken to substitutes for the mass actions so dear to the heart of the sportsman. We've attempted to put an end to these contests altogether....\"\n \n Hoshick coughed explosively, sending a spray of wine into the air.\n\"What are you saying?\" he gasped. \"Are you proposing that Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns abandon honor....?\"\n \n \"Sir!\" said Retief sternly. \"You forget yourself. I, Retief of the Red Tape Mountain, make an alternate proposal more in keeping with the newest sporting principles.\"\n \n \"New?\" cried Hoshick. \"My dear Retief, what a pleasant surprise! I'm enthralled with novel modes. One gets so out of touch. Do elaborate.\"\n \n \"It's quite simple, really. Each side selects a representative and the two individuals settle the issue between them.\"\n \n \"I ... um ... fear I don't understand. What possible significance could one attach to the activities of a couple of random skirmishforms?\"\n \n \"I haven't made myself clear,\" said Retief. He took a sip of wine. \"We don't involve the skirmishforms at all. That's quite passe.\"\n \n \"You don't mean...?\"\n \n \"That's right. You and me.\"\n \n \n\n \n Outside on the starlit sand Retief tossed aside the power pistol, followed it with the leather shirt Swazey had lent him. By the faint light he could just make out the towering figure of the Flap-jack rearing up before him, his trappings gone. A silent rank of Flap-jack retainers were grouped behind him.\n \n \"I fear I must lay aside the translator now, Retief,\" said Hoshick. He sighed and rippled his fringe tentacles. \"My spawn-fellows will never credit this. Such a curious turn fashion has taken. How much more pleasant it is to observe the action of the skirmishforms from a distance.\"\n \n \"I suggest we use Tennessee rules,\" said Retief. \"They're very liberal. Biting, gouging, stomping, kneeing and of course choking, as well as the usual punching, shoving and kicking.\"\n \n \"Hmmm. These gambits seem geared to forms employing rigid endo-skeletons; I fear I shall be at a disadvantage.\"\n \n \"Of course,\" Retief said, \"if you'd prefer a more plebeian type of contest....\"\n \n \"By no means. But perhaps we could rule out tentacle-twisting, just to even it.\"\n \n \"Very well. Shall we begin?\"\n \n With a rush Hoshick threw himself at Retief, who ducked, whirled, and leaped on the Flap-jack's back ... and felt himself flipped clear by a mighty ripple of the alien's slab-like body. Retief rolled aside as Hoshick turned on him; he jumped to his feet and threw a right hay-maker to Hoshick's mid-section. The alien whipped his left fringe around in an arc that connected with Retief's jaw, sent him spinning onto his back ... and Hoshick's weight struck him.\n \n \n\n \n Retief twisted, tried to roll. The flat body of the alien blanketed him. He worked an arm free, drumming blows on the leathery back. Hoshick nestled closer.\n \n Retief's air was running out. He heaved up against the smothering weight. Nothing budged.\n \n It was like burial under a dump-truck-load of concrete.\n \n He remembered the rangerform he had captured. The sensitive orifice had been placed ventrally, in what would be the thoracic area....\n \n He groped, felt tough hide set with horny granules. He would be missing skin tomorrow ... if there was a tomorrow. His thumb found the orifice and probed.\n \n The Flap-jack recoiled. Retief held fast, probed deeper, groping with the other hand. If the alien were bilaterally symmetrical there would be a set of ready made hand-holds....\n \n \n\n \n There were.\n \n Retief dug in and the Flap-jack writhed, pulled away. Retief held on, scrambled to his feet, threw his weight against the alien and fell on top of him, still gouging. Hoshick rippled his fringe wildly, flopped in terror, then went limp.\n \n Retief relaxed, released his hold and got to his feet, breathing hard. Hoshick humped himself over onto his ventral side, lifted and moved gingerly over to the sidelines. His retainers came forward, assisted him into his trappings, strapped on the translator. He sighed heavily, adjusted the volume.\n \n \"There is much to be said for the old system,\" he said. \"What a burden one's sportsmanship places on one at times.\"\n \n \"Great sport, wasn't it?\" said Retief. \"Now, I know you'll be eager to continue. If you'll just wait while I run back and fetch some of our gougerforms\u2014\"\n \n \"May hide-ticks devour the gougerforms!\" Hoshick bellowed. \"You've given me such a sprong-ache as I'll remember each spawning-time for a year.\"\n \n \"Speaking of hide-ticks,\" said Retief, \"we've developed a biterform\u2014\"\n \n \"Enough!\" Hoshick roared, so loudly that the translator bounced on his hide. \"Suddenly I yearn for the crowded yellow sands of Jaq. I had hoped....\" He broke off, drew a rasping breath. \"I had hoped, Retief,\" he said, speaking sadly now, \"to find a new land here where I might plan my own Mosaic, till these alien sands and bring forth such a crop of paradise-lichen as should glut the markets of a hundred worlds. But my spirit is not equal to the prospect of biterforms and gougerforms without end. I am shamed before you....\"\n \n \"To tell you the truth, I'm old-fashioned myself. I'd rather watch the action from a distance too.\"\n \n \"But surely your spawn-fellows would never condone such an attitude.\"\n \n \"My spawn-fellows aren't here. And besides, didn't I mention it? No one who's really in the know would think of engaging in competition by mere combat if there were any other way. Now, you mentioned tilling the sand, raising lichens\u2014things like that\u2014\"\n \n \"That on which we dined but now,\" said Hoshick, \"and from which the wine is made.\"\n \n \"The big news in fashionable diplomacy today is farming competition. Now, if you'd like to take these deserts and raise lichen, we'll promise to stick to the oases and vegetables.\"\n \n Hoshick curled his back in attention. \"Retief, you're quite serious? You would leave all the fair sand hills to us?\"\n \n \"The whole works, Hoshick. I'll take the oases.\"\n \n Hoshick rippled his fringes ecstatically. \"Once again you have outdone me, Retief,\" he cried. \"This time, in generosity.\"\n \n \"We'll talk over the details later. I'm sure we can establish a set of rules that will satisfy all parties. Now I've got to get back. I think some of the gougerforms are waiting to see me.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 29256, "query_start_index": 29258, "query_end_index": 29298, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Consul Passwyn meets with Vice-Consul Retief. Passwyn explains that Terrestrial settlers came to Adobe thinking it was uninhabited, but they started a war with the indigenous life form, the Flap-jacks. Passwyn hands Retief an envelope and tells him that he must handle the situation without any impromptu actions. \n\nThe mail pilot that is supposed to take Retief to Adobe refuses to do his job after he sees that there is a war going on. Retief pilots the skiff himself and crash lands on the planet. He gets out, enters a jungle-like habitat, and immediately looks for cover. A stocky man shoots at Retief, and Retief tackles him to the ground. The man, Potter, tells him that they\u2019ve been waiting for help from Ivory to come and battle the Flap-jacks. \n\nPotter takes Retief to meet with his comrades, and the men explain that the Flap-jacks have recently started using superior weaponry, and more Terrestrials have been killed. Lemuel walks up, butts in the men\u2019s conversation, points a gun at Retief, and accuses him of being a spy. Retief responds by punching Lemuel in the face and knocking him unconscious. The men hear a noise and get down on the ground. Retief tells the others that he\u2019s going to check it out by himself. \n\nRetief enters the desert of Flap-jack country. A Flap-jack attacks him, and in response he is able to wrap his arms around the alien and put his thumb into the creature\u2019s eye. The Flap-jack agrees to take Retief to his leader.\n\nAfter a short walk, Retief crawls on the ground to enter a cave. The leader, Hoshick of the Mosaic of the Two Dawns, congratulates Retief on being a worthy adversary. Hoshick uses a translating device to speak to Retief, and he offers the Terrestrial delicious food and several servings of tasty yellow wine. \n\nRetief asks Hoshick to consider getting rid of all weapons, and he suggests that this is the modern and polite way to fight. Weapons are reserved for vermin. He then goes one step further and asks Hoshick to keep the fight between the two of them. \n\nRetief and Hoshick go outside, remove their weapons, and engage in one-on-one combat. Retief remembers his trick and gouges Hoshick\u2019s eye. Retief wins, and Hoshick agrees to give the Terrestrials the sand that the Flap-jacks desperately want to harvest lichen for their wine. Retief offers to allow the Flap-jacks to keep the desert as long as the Terrestrials can have all of the oases and vegetable farming land. \n\nRetief returns to Potter, Lemuel, Swazey, and Bert. He has the men try the wine that Hoshick gifted to him and tells them about the deal he made. He hands the Treaty and the other important paperwork to Passwyn. Passwyn congratulates him on a job well done and by the book. Retief takes his original envelope of instructions and throws it in the incinerator. \n"}
{"id": "63833_3", "pid": "63833_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJinx Ship To The Rescue\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus.\n \n Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor.\n \n The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship.\n \n \"It looks,\" he commented bitterly, \"like a pregnant carp.\"\n \n Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley\u2014\"Cob\" to his friends\u2014nodded in agreement. \"That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality.\" Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time.\n \n \"Tell me, Captain,\" continued Cob curiously, \"how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought....\"\n \n \"You know Gorman?\" queried Strykalski.\n \n Cob nodded. \"Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?\"\n \n \"The same.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, \"I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?\" He indicated the monitor expressively.\n \n Strike sighed. \"Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition.\n \n \"The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me.\n \n \"From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you.\n \n \"In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger....\"\n \n \"The Procyon A people?\" asked Cob.\n \n \"So you've heard about it.\" Strike shook his head sadly. \"My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists.\" He shrugged. \"Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this.\"\n \n Cob coughed slightly. \"I heard something about Ley City, too.\"\n \n \"Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely.\"\n \n Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. \"That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about....\"\n \n \"Canalopolis?\"\n \n Whitley nodded.\n \n \"That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball.\"\n \n \"I begin to see what you mean, Captain.\"\n \n \"Strike's the name, Cob.\"\n \n Whitley's smile was expansive. \"Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here.\" He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. \"She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either.\"\n \n Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . \"She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her.\"\n \n Cob shrugged philosophically. \"Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Venus-Mars.\"\n \n Cob scratched his chin speculatively. \"Perihelion run. Hot work.\"\n \n Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior.\n\"A surge-circuit monitor, so help me.\"\n \n Cob nodded agreement. \"The last of her class.\"\n \n \n\n \n And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives.\n \n Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine.\n \n All three were miserable failures.\n \n The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly.\n \n The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under\n20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull.\n \n The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did....\n \n The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve.\n \n Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere.\n \n Cob sensed his discomfort. \"That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too.\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable.\"\n \n Cob shrugged. \"Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women.\" He grinned maliciously. \"Equal rights, you know.\"\n \n \"No doubt,\" commented the other sourly. \"Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?\"\n \n Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent.\n \n Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?\" commented Cob.\n \n Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. \"But she's home to us, anyway.\"\n \n The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control.\n \n \"Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty....\"\n \n Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner.\n\"Orders, Captain?\"\n \n \"We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by\n600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. \"Captain,\" he asked, \"Who is the new E/O to be?\"\n \n Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. \"A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say.\"\n \n Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. \"I. V. Hendricks.\" He shook his head. \"Don't know him.\"\n \n \n\n \n The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure.\n \n Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others.\n \n \"... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important.\"\n \n \"That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard.\" He nodded. \"That's the story. Lift ship in....\" He glanced at his wrist chronograph, \"... in an hour and five.\"\n \n The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room.\n\"Captain?\"\n \n \"Come in, Cob.\" Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway.\n \n Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. \"Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?\"\n \n Strike looked blankly at the girl.\n \n \"Our new E/O, Captain,\" prompted Whitley.\n \n \"Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks,\" was all the Captain could find to say.\n \n The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. \"Thank you, Captain.\" Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. \"If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent.\"\n \n Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. \"Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so....\"\n \n The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, \"Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father.\"\n \n \n\n \n A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall.\n \n The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury....\n \n For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman.\n \n And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy.\n \n At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102\u00b0F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing.\n \n Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan.\n \n Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so.\n \n And she agreed.\n \n \n\n \n Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135\u00b0 and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food....\n \n And then it happened.\n \n Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship.\n \n A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end.\n \n Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face.\n \n \"Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!\"\n \n \"Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!\" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head.\n \n She read it through and looked up exultantly. \"This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!\"\n \n He returned her gaze sourly. \"For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself.\"\n \n Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. \"That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!\" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"That's very nice, Lieutenant,\" commented Cob drily. \"And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too.\"\n \n \"Let me understand you, Ivy,\" said Strike in a flat voice. \"What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat.\"\n \n There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. \"But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!\" Her expression turned to one of disgust. \"Or are you afraid?\"\n \n \"Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us.\"\n \n \"We can do it,\" said Ivy Hendricks simply.\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?\"\n \n Whitley shrugged. \"If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me.\"\n \n Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. \"We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty.\"\n \n Strike turned to the squawk-box. \"Evans!\"\n \n \"Evans here,\" came the reply.\n \n \"Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" Cob saluted and was gone.\n \n Strike returned to the squawk-box. \"Radar!\"\n \n \"Graham here,\" replied Celia from her station.\n \n \"Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain,\" the girl replied crisply.\n \n \"Gun deck!\"\n \n \"Gun deck here, sir,\" came a feminine voice.\n \n \"Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" The girl switched off.\n \n \"And now you, Miss Hendricks.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain?\" Her voice was low.\n \n \"Take over Control ... and Ivy....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Don't kill us off.\" He smiled down at her.\n \n She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward....\n \n \n\n \n Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying.\n \n Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport.\n \n The temperature stood at 140\u00b0 and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension.\n \n Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American \"bolas,\" the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together.\n \n \n They were diving into the sun.\n \n\n \n The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145\u00b0 and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison.\n \n Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel.\n \n \" Ivy! \" Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm.\n \n \"I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all.\"\n \n Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit.\n \n Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line.\n \n More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail.\n \n Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. \"Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat.\"\n \n \"We're trying, Cob!\" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. \" Now! \" He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain....\n \n The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. \"We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're....\" And that was all.\n \n The space-tug Scylla found them.\n \n The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol....\n \n \n\n \n The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled.\n \n \"All right,\" said Strike, setting down his glass. \"What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you.\"\n \n Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. \"I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you....\"\n \n \"All I said to him....\"\n \n \"I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?\"\n \n \"Ivy?\"\n \n Cob looked away. \"I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well....\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job.\"\n \n Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. \"But dammit, man, I thought....\"\n \n \"The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but....\" He paused and sighed. \"Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well....\" He shrugged. \"Who wants a wife that ranks you?\"\n \n \"Never thought of that,\" mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked \"Canalopolis, Mars.\"\n \n And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Strike and Aphrodite?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25334, "query_start_index": 25336, "query_end_index": 25400, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Strike is a member of a famous, well-behaved, and well-trained service family. His father and grandfather served in World War II and the Atomic War, respectively. Both earned medals for their heroic service. Strike, however, did not follow in his family\u2019s footsteps. \n\tWith a tendency to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, Strike often offended those around him and garnered a negative reputation. After being put in charge of the Ganymede, he soon lost his position after abandoning his station to rescue colonists who were not in danger. As well, he accused a Martian Ambassador of being a spy at a respectable ball. Admiral Gorman soon demoted him, and he became the commander of the Aphrodite. \n\tAt first, Strike was not a fan. He sees her as ugly, fat, and cantankerous. He misses the Ganymede, a shiny and new rocketship, and views the Aphrodite as less-than. \n\tWithin the first week of flying her, the Aphrodite had a burned steering tube, which made it necessary to go into free-fall as the damage control party made repairs. Strike\u2019s faith in Lover-Girl continued to plummet. \n\tHowever, after Lieutenant Hendricks, the resident engineer, got her hands on the Aphrodite, Strike\u2019s opinion started to change. Her knowledge of the ship, engineering, and piloting helped him gain confidence in both her abilities and those of Aphrodite.\nNear the end of the story, the Aphrodite is tasked with rescuing two ships that are falling into the sun. Previously Lieutenant Hendricks had fixed up the surge-circuit rheostat, and so she offered it up as the only solution. Strike agrees to try it, which shows his faith and trust in the Aphrodite. Luckily, all things go to plan, and the Aphrodite, with Strike piloting, is able to save the two ships and Admiral Gorman. \nAfter Strike won a medal himself, finally following in the family footsteps, he is offered his old position back on the Ganymede. He refuses, and instead returns to old Lover-Girl. He has grown fond of her over the course of their adventure, and they develop a partnership. "}
{"id": "63833_3", "pid": "63833_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJinx Ship To The Rescue\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus.\n \n Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor.\n \n The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship.\n \n \"It looks,\" he commented bitterly, \"like a pregnant carp.\"\n \n Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley\u2014\"Cob\" to his friends\u2014nodded in agreement. \"That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality.\" Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time.\n \n \"Tell me, Captain,\" continued Cob curiously, \"how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought....\"\n \n \"You know Gorman?\" queried Strykalski.\n \n Cob nodded. \"Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?\"\n \n \"The same.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, \"I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?\" He indicated the monitor expressively.\n \n Strike sighed. \"Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition.\n \n \"The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me.\n \n \"From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you.\n \n \"In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger....\"\n \n \"The Procyon A people?\" asked Cob.\n \n \"So you've heard about it.\" Strike shook his head sadly. \"My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists.\" He shrugged. \"Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this.\"\n \n Cob coughed slightly. \"I heard something about Ley City, too.\"\n \n \"Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely.\"\n \n Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. \"That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about....\"\n \n \"Canalopolis?\"\n \n Whitley nodded.\n \n \"That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball.\"\n \n \"I begin to see what you mean, Captain.\"\n \n \"Strike's the name, Cob.\"\n \n Whitley's smile was expansive. \"Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here.\" He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. \"She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either.\"\n \n Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . \"She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her.\"\n \n Cob shrugged philosophically. \"Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Venus-Mars.\"\n \n Cob scratched his chin speculatively. \"Perihelion run. Hot work.\"\n \n Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior.\n\"A surge-circuit monitor, so help me.\"\n \n Cob nodded agreement. \"The last of her class.\"\n \n \n\n \n And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives.\n \n Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine.\n \n All three were miserable failures.\n \n The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly.\n \n The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under\n20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull.\n \n The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did....\n \n The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve.\n \n Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere.\n \n Cob sensed his discomfort. \"That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too.\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable.\"\n \n Cob shrugged. \"Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women.\" He grinned maliciously. \"Equal rights, you know.\"\n \n \"No doubt,\" commented the other sourly. \"Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?\"\n \n Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent.\n \n Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?\" commented Cob.\n \n Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. \"But she's home to us, anyway.\"\n \n The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control.\n \n \"Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty....\"\n \n Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner.\n\"Orders, Captain?\"\n \n \"We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by\n600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. \"Captain,\" he asked, \"Who is the new E/O to be?\"\n \n Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. \"A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say.\"\n \n Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. \"I. V. Hendricks.\" He shook his head. \"Don't know him.\"\n \n \n\n \n The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure.\n \n Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others.\n \n \"... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important.\"\n \n \"That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard.\" He nodded. \"That's the story. Lift ship in....\" He glanced at his wrist chronograph, \"... in an hour and five.\"\n \n The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room.\n\"Captain?\"\n \n \"Come in, Cob.\" Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway.\n \n Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. \"Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?\"\n \n Strike looked blankly at the girl.\n \n \"Our new E/O, Captain,\" prompted Whitley.\n \n \"Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks,\" was all the Captain could find to say.\n \n The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. \"Thank you, Captain.\" Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. \"If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent.\"\n \n Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. \"Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so....\"\n \n The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, \"Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father.\"\n \n \n\n \n A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall.\n \n The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury....\n \n For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman.\n \n And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy.\n \n At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102\u00b0F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing.\n \n Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan.\n \n Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so.\n \n And she agreed.\n \n \n\n \n Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135\u00b0 and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food....\n \n And then it happened.\n \n Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship.\n \n A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end.\n \n Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face.\n \n \"Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!\"\n \n \"Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!\" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head.\n \n She read it through and looked up exultantly. \"This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!\"\n \n He returned her gaze sourly. \"For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself.\"\n \n Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. \"That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!\" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"That's very nice, Lieutenant,\" commented Cob drily. \"And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too.\"\n \n \"Let me understand you, Ivy,\" said Strike in a flat voice. \"What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat.\"\n \n There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. \"But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!\" Her expression turned to one of disgust. \"Or are you afraid?\"\n \n \"Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us.\"\n \n \"We can do it,\" said Ivy Hendricks simply.\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?\"\n \n Whitley shrugged. \"If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me.\"\n \n Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. \"We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty.\"\n \n Strike turned to the squawk-box. \"Evans!\"\n \n \"Evans here,\" came the reply.\n \n \"Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" Cob saluted and was gone.\n \n Strike returned to the squawk-box. \"Radar!\"\n \n \"Graham here,\" replied Celia from her station.\n \n \"Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain,\" the girl replied crisply.\n \n \"Gun deck!\"\n \n \"Gun deck here, sir,\" came a feminine voice.\n \n \"Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" The girl switched off.\n \n \"And now you, Miss Hendricks.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain?\" Her voice was low.\n \n \"Take over Control ... and Ivy....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Don't kill us off.\" He smiled down at her.\n \n She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward....\n \n \n\n \n Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying.\n \n Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport.\n \n The temperature stood at 140\u00b0 and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension.\n \n Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American \"bolas,\" the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together.\n \n \n They were diving into the sun.\n \n\n \n The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145\u00b0 and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison.\n \n Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel.\n \n \" Ivy! \" Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm.\n \n \"I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all.\"\n \n Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit.\n \n Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line.\n \n More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail.\n \n Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. \"Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat.\"\n \n \"We're trying, Cob!\" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. \" Now! \" He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain....\n \n The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. \"We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're....\" And that was all.\n \n The space-tug Scylla found them.\n \n The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol....\n \n \n\n \n The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled.\n \n \"All right,\" said Strike, setting down his glass. \"What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you.\"\n \n Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. \"I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you....\"\n \n \"All I said to him....\"\n \n \"I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?\"\n \n \"Ivy?\"\n \n Cob looked away. \"I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well....\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job.\"\n \n Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. \"But dammit, man, I thought....\"\n \n \"The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but....\" He paused and sighed. \"Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well....\" He shrugged. \"Who wants a wife that ranks you?\"\n \n \"Never thought of that,\" mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked \"Canalopolis, Mars.\"\n \n And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Strike and Aphrodite?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25334, "query_start_index": 25336, "query_end_index": 25400, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Strike is completely unimpressed by the rocket ship Aphrodite. He comments that she looks like a pregnant carp, and he knows that he\u2019s been assigned captain of the ship because he messed up terribly on his other missions. \n\nAphrodite was built 10 years ago, and now she is completely outdated and a laughing stock compared to the other spaceships in the fleet.  She was designed by Harlan Hendricks, and the engineer received a Legion of Merit award for her design. \n\nStrike\u2019s mission is to fly Aphrodite to take the mail from Venusport to Canalopolis, Mars. It\u2019s boring and straightforward.\n\nWhen a disaster occurs and two other ships, the Atropos and the Lachesis, are in serious danger of getting too close to the sun, Strike agrees to take the old girl on a rescue mission. He is convinced by Ivy, since she knows the ship better than anyone else and she believes in her. \n\nAlthough Ivy takes Aphrodite most of the way there, its Strike who finishes the mission and saves his former boss, Gorman, and many other people from certain death. Aphrodite is the entire reason that Strike is able to mend his terrible reputation and he wins back respect from Gorman. Although they got off to a rocky start, Strike finds it impossible to leave his best girl, even when he is offered a job on another ship. He is loyal to the ship that made him a hero. \n"}
{"id": "63833_3", "pid": "63833_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJinx Ship To The Rescue\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus.\n \n Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor.\n \n The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship.\n \n \"It looks,\" he commented bitterly, \"like a pregnant carp.\"\n \n Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley\u2014\"Cob\" to his friends\u2014nodded in agreement. \"That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality.\" Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time.\n \n \"Tell me, Captain,\" continued Cob curiously, \"how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought....\"\n \n \"You know Gorman?\" queried Strykalski.\n \n Cob nodded. \"Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?\"\n \n \"The same.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, \"I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?\" He indicated the monitor expressively.\n \n Strike sighed. \"Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition.\n \n \"The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me.\n \n \"From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you.\n \n \"In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger....\"\n \n \"The Procyon A people?\" asked Cob.\n \n \"So you've heard about it.\" Strike shook his head sadly. \"My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists.\" He shrugged. \"Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this.\"\n \n Cob coughed slightly. \"I heard something about Ley City, too.\"\n \n \"Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely.\"\n \n Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. \"That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about....\"\n \n \"Canalopolis?\"\n \n Whitley nodded.\n \n \"That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball.\"\n \n \"I begin to see what you mean, Captain.\"\n \n \"Strike's the name, Cob.\"\n \n Whitley's smile was expansive. \"Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here.\" He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. \"She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either.\"\n \n Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . \"She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her.\"\n \n Cob shrugged philosophically. \"Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Venus-Mars.\"\n \n Cob scratched his chin speculatively. \"Perihelion run. Hot work.\"\n \n Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior.\n\"A surge-circuit monitor, so help me.\"\n \n Cob nodded agreement. \"The last of her class.\"\n \n \n\n \n And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives.\n \n Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine.\n \n All three were miserable failures.\n \n The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly.\n \n The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under\n20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull.\n \n The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did....\n \n The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve.\n \n Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere.\n \n Cob sensed his discomfort. \"That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too.\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable.\"\n \n Cob shrugged. \"Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women.\" He grinned maliciously. \"Equal rights, you know.\"\n \n \"No doubt,\" commented the other sourly. \"Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?\"\n \n Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent.\n \n Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?\" commented Cob.\n \n Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. \"But she's home to us, anyway.\"\n \n The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control.\n \n \"Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty....\"\n \n Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner.\n\"Orders, Captain?\"\n \n \"We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by\n600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. \"Captain,\" he asked, \"Who is the new E/O to be?\"\n \n Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. \"A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say.\"\n \n Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. \"I. V. Hendricks.\" He shook his head. \"Don't know him.\"\n \n \n\n \n The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure.\n \n Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others.\n \n \"... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important.\"\n \n \"That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard.\" He nodded. \"That's the story. Lift ship in....\" He glanced at his wrist chronograph, \"... in an hour and five.\"\n \n The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room.\n\"Captain?\"\n \n \"Come in, Cob.\" Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway.\n \n Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. \"Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?\"\n \n Strike looked blankly at the girl.\n \n \"Our new E/O, Captain,\" prompted Whitley.\n \n \"Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks,\" was all the Captain could find to say.\n \n The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. \"Thank you, Captain.\" Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. \"If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent.\"\n \n Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. \"Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so....\"\n \n The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, \"Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father.\"\n \n \n\n \n A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall.\n \n The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury....\n \n For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman.\n \n And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy.\n \n At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102\u00b0F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing.\n \n Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan.\n \n Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so.\n \n And she agreed.\n \n \n\n \n Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135\u00b0 and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food....\n \n And then it happened.\n \n Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship.\n \n A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end.\n \n Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face.\n \n \"Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!\"\n \n \"Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!\" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head.\n \n She read it through and looked up exultantly. \"This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!\"\n \n He returned her gaze sourly. \"For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself.\"\n \n Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. \"That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!\" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"That's very nice, Lieutenant,\" commented Cob drily. \"And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too.\"\n \n \"Let me understand you, Ivy,\" said Strike in a flat voice. \"What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat.\"\n \n There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. \"But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!\" Her expression turned to one of disgust. \"Or are you afraid?\"\n \n \"Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us.\"\n \n \"We can do it,\" said Ivy Hendricks simply.\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?\"\n \n Whitley shrugged. \"If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me.\"\n \n Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. \"We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty.\"\n \n Strike turned to the squawk-box. \"Evans!\"\n \n \"Evans here,\" came the reply.\n \n \"Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" Cob saluted and was gone.\n \n Strike returned to the squawk-box. \"Radar!\"\n \n \"Graham here,\" replied Celia from her station.\n \n \"Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain,\" the girl replied crisply.\n \n \"Gun deck!\"\n \n \"Gun deck here, sir,\" came a feminine voice.\n \n \"Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" The girl switched off.\n \n \"And now you, Miss Hendricks.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain?\" Her voice was low.\n \n \"Take over Control ... and Ivy....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Don't kill us off.\" He smiled down at her.\n \n She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward....\n \n \n\n \n Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying.\n \n Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport.\n \n The temperature stood at 140\u00b0 and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension.\n \n Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American \"bolas,\" the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together.\n \n \n They were diving into the sun.\n \n\n \n The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145\u00b0 and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison.\n \n Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel.\n \n \" Ivy! \" Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm.\n \n \"I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all.\"\n \n Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit.\n \n Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line.\n \n More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail.\n \n Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. \"Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat.\"\n \n \"We're trying, Cob!\" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. \" Now! \" He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain....\n \n The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. \"We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're....\" And that was all.\n \n The space-tug Scylla found them.\n \n The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol....\n \n \n\n \n The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled.\n \n \"All right,\" said Strike, setting down his glass. \"What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you.\"\n \n Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. \"I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you....\"\n \n \"All I said to him....\"\n \n \"I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?\"\n \n \"Ivy?\"\n \n Cob looked away. \"I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well....\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job.\"\n \n Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. \"But dammit, man, I thought....\"\n \n \"The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but....\" He paused and sighed. \"Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well....\" He shrugged. \"Who wants a wife that ranks you?\"\n \n \"Never thought of that,\" mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked \"Canalopolis, Mars.\"\n \n And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Strike and Aphrodite?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25334, "query_start_index": 25336, "query_end_index": 25400, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Strike is assigned to be commander of the spaceship Aphrodite. The ship is assigned as a mail carrier for the inner part of the solar system. The Aphrodite is a dilapidated design with an awful reputation. Strike ended up with the Aphrodite as a result of a series of poor professional decisions that resulted in him getting command of the more prestigious ship Ganymede taken away from him.\n\nHis initial impression of the Aphrodite softens to a grudging respect after the successful mission to save the Atropos and Lachesis. Although he presumably is in line to command the Ganymede again, another faux pas resulting in Strike continuing to command the Aphrodite.   "}
{"id": "63833_3", "pid": "63833_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJinx Ship To The Rescue\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus.\n \n Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor.\n \n The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship.\n \n \"It looks,\" he commented bitterly, \"like a pregnant carp.\"\n \n Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley\u2014\"Cob\" to his friends\u2014nodded in agreement. \"That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality.\" Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time.\n \n \"Tell me, Captain,\" continued Cob curiously, \"how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought....\"\n \n \"You know Gorman?\" queried Strykalski.\n \n Cob nodded. \"Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?\"\n \n \"The same.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, \"I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?\" He indicated the monitor expressively.\n \n Strike sighed. \"Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition.\n \n \"The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me.\n \n \"From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you.\n \n \"In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger....\"\n \n \"The Procyon A people?\" asked Cob.\n \n \"So you've heard about it.\" Strike shook his head sadly. \"My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists.\" He shrugged. \"Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this.\"\n \n Cob coughed slightly. \"I heard something about Ley City, too.\"\n \n \"Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely.\"\n \n Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. \"That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about....\"\n \n \"Canalopolis?\"\n \n Whitley nodded.\n \n \"That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball.\"\n \n \"I begin to see what you mean, Captain.\"\n \n \"Strike's the name, Cob.\"\n \n Whitley's smile was expansive. \"Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here.\" He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. \"She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either.\"\n \n Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . \"She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her.\"\n \n Cob shrugged philosophically. \"Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Venus-Mars.\"\n \n Cob scratched his chin speculatively. \"Perihelion run. Hot work.\"\n \n Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior.\n\"A surge-circuit monitor, so help me.\"\n \n Cob nodded agreement. \"The last of her class.\"\n \n \n\n \n And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives.\n \n Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine.\n \n All three were miserable failures.\n \n The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly.\n \n The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under\n20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull.\n \n The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did....\n \n The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve.\n \n Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere.\n \n Cob sensed his discomfort. \"That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too.\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable.\"\n \n Cob shrugged. \"Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women.\" He grinned maliciously. \"Equal rights, you know.\"\n \n \"No doubt,\" commented the other sourly. \"Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?\"\n \n Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent.\n \n Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?\" commented Cob.\n \n Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. \"But she's home to us, anyway.\"\n \n The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control.\n \n \"Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty....\"\n \n Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner.\n\"Orders, Captain?\"\n \n \"We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by\n600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. \"Captain,\" he asked, \"Who is the new E/O to be?\"\n \n Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. \"A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say.\"\n \n Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. \"I. V. Hendricks.\" He shook his head. \"Don't know him.\"\n \n \n\n \n The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure.\n \n Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others.\n \n \"... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important.\"\n \n \"That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard.\" He nodded. \"That's the story. Lift ship in....\" He glanced at his wrist chronograph, \"... in an hour and five.\"\n \n The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room.\n\"Captain?\"\n \n \"Come in, Cob.\" Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway.\n \n Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. \"Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?\"\n \n Strike looked blankly at the girl.\n \n \"Our new E/O, Captain,\" prompted Whitley.\n \n \"Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks,\" was all the Captain could find to say.\n \n The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. \"Thank you, Captain.\" Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. \"If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent.\"\n \n Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. \"Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so....\"\n \n The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, \"Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father.\"\n \n \n\n \n A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall.\n \n The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury....\n \n For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman.\n \n And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy.\n \n At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102\u00b0F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing.\n \n Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan.\n \n Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so.\n \n And she agreed.\n \n \n\n \n Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135\u00b0 and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food....\n \n And then it happened.\n \n Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship.\n \n A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end.\n \n Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face.\n \n \"Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!\"\n \n \"Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!\" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head.\n \n She read it through and looked up exultantly. \"This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!\"\n \n He returned her gaze sourly. \"For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself.\"\n \n Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. \"That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!\" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"That's very nice, Lieutenant,\" commented Cob drily. \"And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too.\"\n \n \"Let me understand you, Ivy,\" said Strike in a flat voice. \"What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat.\"\n \n There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. \"But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!\" Her expression turned to one of disgust. \"Or are you afraid?\"\n \n \"Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us.\"\n \n \"We can do it,\" said Ivy Hendricks simply.\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?\"\n \n Whitley shrugged. \"If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me.\"\n \n Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. \"We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty.\"\n \n Strike turned to the squawk-box. \"Evans!\"\n \n \"Evans here,\" came the reply.\n \n \"Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" Cob saluted and was gone.\n \n Strike returned to the squawk-box. \"Radar!\"\n \n \"Graham here,\" replied Celia from her station.\n \n \"Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain,\" the girl replied crisply.\n \n \"Gun deck!\"\n \n \"Gun deck here, sir,\" came a feminine voice.\n \n \"Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" The girl switched off.\n \n \"And now you, Miss Hendricks.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain?\" Her voice was low.\n \n \"Take over Control ... and Ivy....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Don't kill us off.\" He smiled down at her.\n \n She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward....\n \n \n\n \n Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying.\n \n Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport.\n \n The temperature stood at 140\u00b0 and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension.\n \n Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American \"bolas,\" the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together.\n \n \n They were diving into the sun.\n \n\n \n The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145\u00b0 and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison.\n \n Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel.\n \n \" Ivy! \" Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm.\n \n \"I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all.\"\n \n Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit.\n \n Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line.\n \n More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail.\n \n Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. \"Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat.\"\n \n \"We're trying, Cob!\" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. \" Now! \" He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain....\n \n The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. \"We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're....\" And that was all.\n \n The space-tug Scylla found them.\n \n The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol....\n \n \n\n \n The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled.\n \n \"All right,\" said Strike, setting down his glass. \"What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you.\"\n \n Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. \"I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you....\"\n \n \"All I said to him....\"\n \n \"I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?\"\n \n \"Ivy?\"\n \n Cob looked away. \"I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well....\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job.\"\n \n Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. \"But dammit, man, I thought....\"\n \n \"The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but....\" He paused and sighed. \"Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well....\" He shrugged. \"Who wants a wife that ranks you?\"\n \n \"Never thought of that,\" mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked \"Canalopolis, Mars.\"\n \n And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the relationship between Strike and Aphrodite?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25334, "query_start_index": 25336, "query_end_index": 25400, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "At the beginning of the story, Strike is very reluctant to accept Aphrodite, because being in charge of the ship means a demotion for him. His perception of the ship at the beginning of the story is colored by this history, and his first impression of the ship is not a positive one, even from the outside. Besides the actual construction of the ship, the technology that ran it was not something he showed much faith in. The first week that he was in charge after leaving Venus, it seemed things were going drastically wrong. When one important piece of equipment burnt out, the ship went into freefall, requiring a lot of repair work from the engineers, and anyone in charge of navigation was handed more work because of this as well. The ship was really put to the test when the Aphrodite responded to the distress call from the Lachesis, whose crew was trying to keep the Atropos from falling into the sun. Because Ivy knew the Aphrodite so well, and had been working on the circuits, it turned out the Aphrodite was the perfect ship to save the day. She could not see the rescue all the way through to the end, because she passed out early, but Strike was conscious a little bit longer and took over until he also passed out. After this unexpected rescue mission, Cob, the Executive Officer, noted that Strike has a newfound appreciation for the ship, and has no intention of leaving. Strike is dedicated to his new mission, even though at the beginning of the story he wanted nothing more than to pilot something the same rank as his old ship."}
{"id": "51650_4", "pid": "51650_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nINNOCENT AT LARGE\n \n \n By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON\n \n Illustrated by WOOD\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\n \n\n \n The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise\u2014or had it been the chairman of the board?\u2014back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips.\n \n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.\n \n She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\" she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and\u2014Oh. It's you.\"\n \n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date tonight.\"\n \n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\n \n \n\n \n Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"\n \n Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n \n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"\n \n Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby.\"\n \n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n \n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three\u2014\"\n \n \"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\n \n \n\n \n The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n \n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014recruiting.\"\n \n The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. \"I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?\"\n \n \"Oh, we don't expect immigration,\" said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. \"We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire\u2014\u2014uh, I mean engage\u2014an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some\u2014a five-year contract...?\"\n \n He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself.\n \n \"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks\u2014um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I\u2014we need\u2014that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by.\"\n \n He backed out of the office.\n \n \n\n \n A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement!\n \n \n The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but\u2014he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero.\n  Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\n \n \n He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now\u2014in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea\u2014but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown\u2014\n  My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man!\n \n \n He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever.\n \n The city roared at him.\n \n He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\n \n \n He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood.\n \n The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\n \n \n\n \n Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity.\n \n \n THE CHURCH OF CHOICE\n   Enter, Play, Pray\n \n \n That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n \n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in\u2014\"\n \n \"To your left, sir.\"\n \n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n \n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n \n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n \n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.\n \n He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n \n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n \n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice.\n \n \"But\u2014I mean\u2014when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?\"\n \n \n\n \n The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir! This is a church!\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014I see\u2014excuse me, I, I, I\u2014\" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n \n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n \n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is\u2014\" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\n \n \n The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers.\n \n \"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.\n \n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I\u2014\" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n \n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n \n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n \n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n \n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.\n \n \"I don't want to\u2014I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran\u2014\"\n \n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n \n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n \n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.\"\n \n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?\"\n \n \"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n \n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\n \n \n\n \n He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve\u2014\n \n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"\n \n \"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n \n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor\u2014a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies\u2014which can only be paid for in Earth dollars\u2014and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"\n \n By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n \n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?\"\n \n \"Uh, yes, but\u2014well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n \n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n \n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n \n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"\n \n Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n \n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n \n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean\u2014well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?\"\n \n \"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes\u2014there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n \n \"Have you not got some other business?\"\n \n \"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful\u2014 I Was a Slave Girl on Mars .\n \n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around\u2014you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars\u2014but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"\n \n \"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big business, I have heard.\"\n \n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or\u2014or anybody\u2014who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars\u2014why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state\u2014what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?\"\n \n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n \n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n \n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"\n \n \"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n \n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n \n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n \n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist.\"\n  Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\n \n \n The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.\n \n \"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n \n \"A pleasure.\"\n \n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n \n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with the situation as you have been describing\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.\"\n \n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business, then?\"\n \n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.\"\n \n \"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets\u2014uh, taxes\u2014and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\n \n \n\n \n Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and\u2014and\u2014well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.\"\n \n Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.\n \n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see\u2014\"\n \n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n \n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.\"\n \n \"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n \n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n \n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts....\n \n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"\n \n A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.\n \n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want\u2014I mean what Mars really needs, get me?\u2014is a confidence man.\"\n \n \"A what?\"\n \n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.\"\n \n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n \n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\n \n \n\n \n Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.\"\n \n \"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.\n \n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n \n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n \n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some gaiety.\"\n \n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n \n \" Allez ,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors .\"\n \n The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\n  Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble.\n \n \n And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n \n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell\u2014Oh.\" He tried to grin, but his face burned. \"I see.\"\n \n \"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n2100 hours earliest.\"\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n \n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is\u2014\" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.\n \n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.\"\n \n \"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate\u2014\"\n \n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does she?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014well, no. I guess not No.\"\n \n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\n \n \n\n \n While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n \n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n \n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"\n \n \"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n \n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n \n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n\"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.\"\n \n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively.\"\n \n Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious.\n \n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n \n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n \n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n \n \"What? But\u2014but\u2014\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n \n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation.\n \n \"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry to\u2014to\u2014I mean of course I trust you, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange\u2014Go ahead, boy, go ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n \n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are operating con games.\"\n \n \"On Mars, you mean?\"\n \n \"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n \n \" Huh? Well, why, but\u2014\"\n \n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to\u2014Well, anyhow\u2014\"\n \n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n \n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.\"\n \n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember\u2014Hey! You didn't!\"\n \n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n \n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n \n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\" Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n \n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.\n \n \"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few\u2014' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n \n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already.\n \n Doran whistled.\n \n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but\u2014well, I don't know.\"\n \n \"I think\u2014\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.\n \n \"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n \n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n \n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran\u2014Gus\u2014you could actually\u2014\"\n \n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Red Ankh Society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30087, "query_start_index": 30089, "query_end_index": 30148, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Red Ankh Society is a con devised by Peter for the Martian government as a way to boost their economy. People paid for the exclusive privilege of access to the secrets and ancient wisdom of the Old Martians; in reality, these were just bogus semantics compiled for the sake of earning large amounts of money. However, the existence of the Red Ankh Society reveals quite a bit about Mars, the role of cons in the story, and even Peter himself. During Peter's discussion with Gus, we learn the Martians are descended from Earthmen who preferred greater freedom than was offered by the United Protectorate and moved to Mars to establish a life there. They work to make the planet habitable and attractive to tourists, but the process is slow because they cannot afford the equipment and power plants required to build on a scale that will attract the necessary amount of visitors needed to turn a profit. This leads the government to resort to drastic measures; they wield their skills at playing tricks and cheating at gambling (they even have a city called Swindletown) to implement a number of schemes meant to draw in vast amounts of cash such as the Red Ankh Society, the construction and sale of phony ancient relics and ruins, and the saga of Junie O'Brien (a little girl whose fake illness raised a billion dollars for the planet). This leads the government to send Peter to Earth in order to purchase the services of a con man who can help implement a new scheme to sell Martian securities. This trip introduces Peter to Gus, who begins work on a plan to swindle Peter out of a million dollars."}
{"id": "51650_4", "pid": "51650_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nINNOCENT AT LARGE\n \n \n By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON\n \n Illustrated by WOOD\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\n \n\n \n The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise\u2014or had it been the chairman of the board?\u2014back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips.\n \n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.\n \n She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\" she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and\u2014Oh. It's you.\"\n \n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date tonight.\"\n \n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\n \n \n\n \n Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"\n \n Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n \n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"\n \n Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby.\"\n \n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n \n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three\u2014\"\n \n \"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\n \n \n\n \n The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n \n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014recruiting.\"\n \n The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. \"I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?\"\n \n \"Oh, we don't expect immigration,\" said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. \"We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire\u2014\u2014uh, I mean engage\u2014an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some\u2014a five-year contract...?\"\n \n He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself.\n \n \"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks\u2014um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I\u2014we need\u2014that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by.\"\n \n He backed out of the office.\n \n \n\n \n A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement!\n \n \n The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but\u2014he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero.\n  Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\n \n \n He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now\u2014in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea\u2014but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown\u2014\n  My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man!\n \n \n He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever.\n \n The city roared at him.\n \n He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\n \n \n He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood.\n \n The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\n \n \n\n \n Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity.\n \n \n THE CHURCH OF CHOICE\n   Enter, Play, Pray\n \n \n That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n \n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in\u2014\"\n \n \"To your left, sir.\"\n \n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n \n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n \n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n \n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.\n \n He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n \n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n \n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice.\n \n \"But\u2014I mean\u2014when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?\"\n \n \n\n \n The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir! This is a church!\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014I see\u2014excuse me, I, I, I\u2014\" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n \n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n \n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is\u2014\" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\n \n \n The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers.\n \n \"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.\n \n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I\u2014\" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n \n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n \n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n \n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n \n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.\n \n \"I don't want to\u2014I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran\u2014\"\n \n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n \n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n \n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.\"\n \n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?\"\n \n \"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n \n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\n \n \n\n \n He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve\u2014\n \n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"\n \n \"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n \n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor\u2014a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies\u2014which can only be paid for in Earth dollars\u2014and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"\n \n By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n \n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?\"\n \n \"Uh, yes, but\u2014well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n \n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n \n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n \n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"\n \n Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n \n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n \n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean\u2014well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?\"\n \n \"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes\u2014there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n \n \"Have you not got some other business?\"\n \n \"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful\u2014 I Was a Slave Girl on Mars .\n \n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around\u2014you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars\u2014but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"\n \n \"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big business, I have heard.\"\n \n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or\u2014or anybody\u2014who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars\u2014why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state\u2014what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?\"\n \n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n \n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n \n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"\n \n \"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n \n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n \n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n \n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist.\"\n  Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\n \n \n The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.\n \n \"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n \n \"A pleasure.\"\n \n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n \n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with the situation as you have been describing\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.\"\n \n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business, then?\"\n \n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.\"\n \n \"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets\u2014uh, taxes\u2014and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\n \n \n\n \n Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and\u2014and\u2014well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.\"\n \n Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.\n \n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see\u2014\"\n \n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n \n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.\"\n \n \"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n \n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n \n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts....\n \n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"\n \n A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.\n \n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want\u2014I mean what Mars really needs, get me?\u2014is a confidence man.\"\n \n \"A what?\"\n \n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.\"\n \n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n \n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\n \n \n\n \n Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.\"\n \n \"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.\n \n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n \n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n \n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some gaiety.\"\n \n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n \n \" Allez ,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors .\"\n \n The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\n  Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble.\n \n \n And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n \n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell\u2014Oh.\" He tried to grin, but his face burned. \"I see.\"\n \n \"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n2100 hours earliest.\"\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n \n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is\u2014\" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.\n \n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.\"\n \n \"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate\u2014\"\n \n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does she?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014well, no. I guess not No.\"\n \n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\n \n \n\n \n While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n \n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n \n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"\n \n \"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n \n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n \n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n\"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.\"\n \n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively.\"\n \n Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious.\n \n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n \n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n \n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n \n \"What? But\u2014but\u2014\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n \n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation.\n \n \"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry to\u2014to\u2014I mean of course I trust you, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange\u2014Go ahead, boy, go ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n \n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are operating con games.\"\n \n \"On Mars, you mean?\"\n \n \"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n \n \" Huh? Well, why, but\u2014\"\n \n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to\u2014Well, anyhow\u2014\"\n \n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n \n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.\"\n \n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember\u2014Hey! You didn't!\"\n \n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n \n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n \n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\" Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n \n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.\n \n \"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few\u2014' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n \n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already.\n \n Doran whistled.\n \n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but\u2014well, I don't know.\"\n \n \"I think\u2014\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.\n \n \"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n \n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n \n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran\u2014Gus\u2014you could actually\u2014\"\n \n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Red Ankh Society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30087, "query_start_index": 30089, "query_end_index": 30148, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Red Ankh society is one of may cons that Peter has come up with to help the Martian government make money. The Society claims to have secret knowledge from ancient aliens, and people who purchase a membership into the Society can get their hands on the information that the old Martians had. Peter admits that he himself came up with this con, and although it has made some money for the planet, it just isn't enough. The Martian embassy is looking for an Earthman who can help the Martians trick the other Earthmen into investing in Mars or perhaps creating a tourist industry there, although there's really nothing worth seeing. The Red Ankh Society is emblematic of the way the Martians make money: by tricking Earthmen into believing that Mars is mysterious and interesting and purchasing items that truly hold no value. "}
{"id": "51650_4", "pid": "51650_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nINNOCENT AT LARGE\n \n \n By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON\n \n Illustrated by WOOD\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\n \n\n \n The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise\u2014or had it been the chairman of the board?\u2014back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips.\n \n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.\n \n She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\" she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and\u2014Oh. It's you.\"\n \n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date tonight.\"\n \n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\n \n \n\n \n Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"\n \n Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n \n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"\n \n Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby.\"\n \n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n \n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three\u2014\"\n \n \"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\n \n \n\n \n The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n \n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014recruiting.\"\n \n The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. \"I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?\"\n \n \"Oh, we don't expect immigration,\" said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. \"We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire\u2014\u2014uh, I mean engage\u2014an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some\u2014a five-year contract...?\"\n \n He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself.\n \n \"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks\u2014um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I\u2014we need\u2014that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by.\"\n \n He backed out of the office.\n \n \n\n \n A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement!\n \n \n The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but\u2014he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero.\n  Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\n \n \n He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now\u2014in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea\u2014but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown\u2014\n  My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man!\n \n \n He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever.\n \n The city roared at him.\n \n He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\n \n \n He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood.\n \n The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\n \n \n\n \n Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity.\n \n \n THE CHURCH OF CHOICE\n   Enter, Play, Pray\n \n \n That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n \n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in\u2014\"\n \n \"To your left, sir.\"\n \n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n \n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n \n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n \n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.\n \n He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n \n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n \n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice.\n \n \"But\u2014I mean\u2014when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?\"\n \n \n\n \n The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir! This is a church!\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014I see\u2014excuse me, I, I, I\u2014\" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n \n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n \n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is\u2014\" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\n \n \n The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers.\n \n \"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.\n \n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I\u2014\" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n \n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n \n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n \n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n \n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.\n \n \"I don't want to\u2014I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran\u2014\"\n \n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n \n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n \n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.\"\n \n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?\"\n \n \"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n \n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\n \n \n\n \n He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve\u2014\n \n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"\n \n \"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n \n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor\u2014a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies\u2014which can only be paid for in Earth dollars\u2014and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"\n \n By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n \n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?\"\n \n \"Uh, yes, but\u2014well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n \n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n \n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n \n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"\n \n Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n \n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n \n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean\u2014well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?\"\n \n \"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes\u2014there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n \n \"Have you not got some other business?\"\n \n \"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful\u2014 I Was a Slave Girl on Mars .\n \n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around\u2014you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars\u2014but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"\n \n \"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big business, I have heard.\"\n \n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or\u2014or anybody\u2014who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars\u2014why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state\u2014what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?\"\n \n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n \n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n \n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"\n \n \"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n \n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n \n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n \n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist.\"\n  Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\n \n \n The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.\n \n \"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n \n \"A pleasure.\"\n \n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n \n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with the situation as you have been describing\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.\"\n \n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business, then?\"\n \n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.\"\n \n \"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets\u2014uh, taxes\u2014and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\n \n \n\n \n Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and\u2014and\u2014well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.\"\n \n Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.\n \n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see\u2014\"\n \n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n \n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.\"\n \n \"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n \n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n \n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts....\n \n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"\n \n A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.\n \n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want\u2014I mean what Mars really needs, get me?\u2014is a confidence man.\"\n \n \"A what?\"\n \n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.\"\n \n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n \n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\n \n \n\n \n Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.\"\n \n \"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.\n \n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n \n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n \n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some gaiety.\"\n \n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n \n \" Allez ,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors .\"\n \n The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\n  Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble.\n \n \n And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n \n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell\u2014Oh.\" He tried to grin, but his face burned. \"I see.\"\n \n \"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n2100 hours earliest.\"\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n \n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is\u2014\" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.\n \n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.\"\n \n \"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate\u2014\"\n \n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does she?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014well, no. I guess not No.\"\n \n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\n \n \n\n \n While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n \n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n \n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"\n \n \"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n \n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n \n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n\"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.\"\n \n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively.\"\n \n Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious.\n \n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n \n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n \n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n \n \"What? But\u2014but\u2014\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n \n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation.\n \n \"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry to\u2014to\u2014I mean of course I trust you, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange\u2014Go ahead, boy, go ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n \n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are operating con games.\"\n \n \"On Mars, you mean?\"\n \n \"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n \n \" Huh? Well, why, but\u2014\"\n \n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to\u2014Well, anyhow\u2014\"\n \n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n \n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.\"\n \n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember\u2014Hey! You didn't!\"\n \n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n \n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n \n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\" Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n \n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.\n \n \"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few\u2014' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n \n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already.\n \n Doran whistled.\n \n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but\u2014well, I don't know.\"\n \n \"I think\u2014\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.\n \n \"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n \n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n \n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran\u2014Gus\u2014you could actually\u2014\"\n \n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Red Ankh Society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30087, "query_start_index": 30089, "query_end_index": 30148, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Peter Matheny, a sociodynamics professor at Devil\u2019s Kettle University, is the person who came up with the idea for the Red Ankh Society, which was established as a money-making venture for Mars, and he was selected for the mission to Earth because of this idea. The Society advertises that it can pass on the \u201cmysterious knowledge\u201d of the Old Martians and possesses the \u201csecret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens.\u201d The organization is a fake, but it has become the top dollar-earning business on Mars. While Mars lags behind Earth in its earning capacity, this organization generates more money for Mars than any other business. This scam is just one of several that Mars has used to make money.\n"}
{"id": "51650_4", "pid": "51650_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nINNOCENT AT LARGE\n \n \n By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON\n \n Illustrated by WOOD\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\n \n\n \n The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise\u2014or had it been the chairman of the board?\u2014back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips.\n \n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.\n \n She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\" she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and\u2014Oh. It's you.\"\n \n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date tonight.\"\n \n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\n \n \n\n \n Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"\n \n Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n \n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"\n \n Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby.\"\n \n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n \n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three\u2014\"\n \n \"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\n \n \n\n \n The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n \n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014recruiting.\"\n \n The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. \"I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?\"\n \n \"Oh, we don't expect immigration,\" said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. \"We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire\u2014\u2014uh, I mean engage\u2014an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some\u2014a five-year contract...?\"\n \n He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself.\n \n \"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks\u2014um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I\u2014we need\u2014that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by.\"\n \n He backed out of the office.\n \n \n\n \n A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement!\n \n \n The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but\u2014he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero.\n  Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\n \n \n He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now\u2014in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea\u2014but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown\u2014\n  My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man!\n \n \n He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever.\n \n The city roared at him.\n \n He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\n \n \n He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood.\n \n The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\n \n \n\n \n Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity.\n \n \n THE CHURCH OF CHOICE\n   Enter, Play, Pray\n \n \n That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n \n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in\u2014\"\n \n \"To your left, sir.\"\n \n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n \n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n \n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n \n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.\n \n He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n \n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n \n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice.\n \n \"But\u2014I mean\u2014when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?\"\n \n \n\n \n The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir! This is a church!\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014I see\u2014excuse me, I, I, I\u2014\" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n \n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n \n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is\u2014\" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\n \n \n The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers.\n \n \"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.\n \n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I\u2014\" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n \n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n \n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n \n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n \n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.\n \n \"I don't want to\u2014I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran\u2014\"\n \n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n \n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n \n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.\"\n \n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?\"\n \n \"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n \n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\n \n \n\n \n He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve\u2014\n \n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"\n \n \"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n \n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor\u2014a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies\u2014which can only be paid for in Earth dollars\u2014and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"\n \n By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n \n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?\"\n \n \"Uh, yes, but\u2014well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n \n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n \n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n \n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"\n \n Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n \n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n \n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean\u2014well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?\"\n \n \"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes\u2014there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n \n \"Have you not got some other business?\"\n \n \"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful\u2014 I Was a Slave Girl on Mars .\n \n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around\u2014you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars\u2014but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"\n \n \"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big business, I have heard.\"\n \n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or\u2014or anybody\u2014who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars\u2014why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state\u2014what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?\"\n \n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n \n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n \n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"\n \n \"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n \n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n \n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n \n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist.\"\n  Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\n \n \n The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.\n \n \"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n \n \"A pleasure.\"\n \n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n \n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with the situation as you have been describing\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.\"\n \n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business, then?\"\n \n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.\"\n \n \"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets\u2014uh, taxes\u2014and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\n \n \n\n \n Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and\u2014and\u2014well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.\"\n \n Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.\n \n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see\u2014\"\n \n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n \n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.\"\n \n \"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n \n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n \n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts....\n \n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"\n \n A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.\n \n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want\u2014I mean what Mars really needs, get me?\u2014is a confidence man.\"\n \n \"A what?\"\n \n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.\"\n \n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n \n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\n \n \n\n \n Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.\"\n \n \"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.\n \n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n \n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n \n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some gaiety.\"\n \n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n \n \" Allez ,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors .\"\n \n The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\n  Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble.\n \n \n And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n \n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell\u2014Oh.\" He tried to grin, but his face burned. \"I see.\"\n \n \"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n2100 hours earliest.\"\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n \n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is\u2014\" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.\n \n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.\"\n \n \"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate\u2014\"\n \n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does she?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014well, no. I guess not No.\"\n \n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\n \n \n\n \n While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n \n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n \n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"\n \n \"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n \n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n \n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n\"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.\"\n \n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively.\"\n \n Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious.\n \n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n \n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n \n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n \n \"What? But\u2014but\u2014\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n \n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation.\n \n \"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry to\u2014to\u2014I mean of course I trust you, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange\u2014Go ahead, boy, go ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n \n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are operating con games.\"\n \n \"On Mars, you mean?\"\n \n \"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n \n \" Huh? Well, why, but\u2014\"\n \n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to\u2014Well, anyhow\u2014\"\n \n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n \n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.\"\n \n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember\u2014Hey! You didn't!\"\n \n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n \n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n \n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\" Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n \n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.\n \n \"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few\u2014' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n \n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already.\n \n Doran whistled.\n \n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but\u2014well, I don't know.\"\n \n \"I think\u2014\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.\n \n \"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n \n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n \n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran\u2014Gus\u2014you could actually\u2014\"\n \n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of the Red Ankh Society?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30087, "query_start_index": 30089, "query_end_index": 30148, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Red Ankh Society was a ploy developed by Peter Matheny to bring more capital to the Martian Nation. This scheme involved producing advertisements, both visual and auditory, that told stories of the Ancient Aliens of Mars. This older generation supposedly had lots of wisdom to share with a select audience. The Red Ankh Society was only available to the few people willing to pay the steep price for it to uncover more secrets about the ancient Martians. This Society is significant because it is one of the reasons the Martian government chose creator Peter Matheny for this job on Earth, and it shows what schemes and ploys the Martians must come up with in order to make money. "}
{"id": "51267_3", "pid": "51267_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nEND AS A HERO\n \n \n By KEITH LAUMER\n \n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Granthan's mission was the most vital of the war. It would mean instant victory\u2014but for whom?\n \n \n\n I\n \n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went on and on. And then I was awake\u2014and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me.\n \n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.\n \n I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch\u2014the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....\n \n There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again....\n \n \n\n \n I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm\u2014well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn't anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn't amputated. I wasn't complaining.\n \n As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool\u2014if I survived.\n \n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.\n \n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition\u2014with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull\u2014I shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar's CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here\u2014and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.\n \n I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look.\n \n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n \n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for an answer\u2014not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n \n \" Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh \u2014I think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me.\"\n \n I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed off\u2014and awoke with a start. Kayle was talking.\n \n \"\u2014your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n \n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled\u2014or croaked. But Kayle's voice was droning on:\n \n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack\u2014and came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.\n \n \"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility of\u2014what's that term you use?\u2014hyper-cortical invasion. You know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept the risk.\"\n \n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!\"\n \n Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and pretend\u2014right up until the warheads struck\u2014that I didn't know I'd been condemned to death.\n \n \n\n II\n \n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders.\n \n I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were mine, all mine....\n \n But how could I be sure of that?\n \n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tampering\u2014not at a conscious level.\n \n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mind\u2014and I had been prepared for just such an attack.\n \n Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious\u2014and see again what had happened.\n \n I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence....\n \n Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper....\n \n \n\n \n The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.\n \n And found it.\n \n As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations.\n \n I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.\n \n \" It is a contact, Effulgent One! \"\n \n \" Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the threshold.... \"\n \n \" It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough! \"\n \n A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the voices\u2014yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding stimuli\u2014then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me\u2014and then the hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought\u2014and the world-ending impact as I fell.\n \n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality lashed out again\u2014fighting the invader.\n \n \" Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one! \"\n \n \" Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force! \"\n \n Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering\u2014at a conscious level.\n \n Watching the Gool mind, I learned.\n \n The insinuating probe\u2014a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had theorized\u2014was no more than a pattern in emptiness....\n \n But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me.\n \n Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves.\n \n Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void\u2014and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape.\n \n There was a soundless shriek. \" Effulgence! It reached out\u2014touched me! \"\n \n \n\n \n Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia\u2014a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.\n \n I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind....\n \n I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a more favorable position.\n \n \n\n \n I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals\u2014riches beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe cluster\u2014those who remained of a once-great race\u2014at a single feeding trough. They would spread out across a galaxy\u2014and beyond.\n \n But not if I could help it.\n \n The Gool had evolved a plan\u2014but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n \n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough, perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n \n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see what I could steal.\n \n A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts, fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the concepts of an alien mind.\n \n I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.\n \n I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its meaning exploded in my mind.\n \n From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of their kind.\n \n Matter across space.\n \n \n\n \n \"You've got to listen to me, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I know you think I'm a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil\u2014and a few other things....\"\n \n I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sweated out his answer. I was getting close now. If he couldn't see the beauty of my proposal, my screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now.\n \n Kayle came back\u2014and his answer boiled down to \"no.\"\n \n I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex.\n \n I might have saved my breath.\n \n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n\"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n \n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the problem at hand.\n \n I keyed the chart file, flashed pages from the standard index on the reference screen, checking radar coverages, beacon ranges, monitor stations, controller fields. It looked as though a radar-negative boat the size of mine might possibly get through the defensive net with a daring pilot, and as a condemned spy, I could afford to be daring.\n \n And I had a few ideas.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The shrilling of the proximity alarm blasted through the silence. For a wild moment I thought Kayle had beaten me to the punch; then I realized it was the routine DEW line patrol contact.\n \n \"Z four-oh-two, I am reading your IFF. Decelerate at 1.8 gee preparatory to picking up approach orbit....\"\n \n The screen went on droning out instructions. I fed them into the autopilot, at the same time running over my approach plan. The scout was moving in closer. I licked dry lips. It was time to try.\n \n I closed my eyes, reached out\u2014as the Gool mind had reached out to me\u2014and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched keys, spoke into his microphone:\n \n \"As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down.\"\n \n I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line now, rapidly approaching atmosphere.\n \n \"Z four-oh-two,\" the speaker crackled. \"This is planetary control. I am picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down.\"\n \n There was a long pause. Then:\n \n \"Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!\"\n \n It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it dumb, and hope for a little luck.\n \n \"Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that, fellows. I'm a little banged up\u2014I guess I switched frequencies on you. What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?\"\n \n \"Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!\"\n \n \"Hey, you birds are mixed up,\" I protested. \"I'm cleared all the way. I checked in with DEW\u2014\"\n \n It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out\u2014\n \n A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar screens blanked off....\n \n For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up, over, buffeting me against the restraining harness.\n \n I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on the water.\n \n I would have to risk calling Kayle now\u2014but by voluntarily giving my position away, I should convince him I was still on our side\u2014and I was badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n \n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n \n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You penetrated the planetary defenses\u2014God knows how. I\u2014\"\n \n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other complaints.\"\n \n \"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it, Granthan.\"\n \n \n\n \n I felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already. Call them back! I have information that can win the war\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late\u2014even if I could take the chance you were right.\"\n \n A different face appeared on the screen.\n \n \"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and in the name of the President\u2014who has been apprised of this tragic situation\u2014it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor\u2014posthumously\u2014for your heroic effort. Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will, to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n \n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n \n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n \n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n \n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"\n \n I flipped the switch, sat gripping the couch, my stomach rising with each heave of the floating escape capsule. I had perhaps five minutes. The missiles would be from Canaveral.\n \n I closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, reached out....\n \n I sensed the distant shore, the hot buzz of human minds at work in the cities. I followed the coastline, found the Missile Base, flicked through the cluster of minds.\n \n \"\u2014 missile on course; do right, baby. That's it, right in the slot. \"\n \n I fingered my way through the man's mind and found the control centers. He turned stiffly from the plotting board, tottered to a panel to slam his hand against the destruct button.\n \n Men fell on him, dragged him back. \"\u2014 fool, why did you blow it? \"\n \n I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel, detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew. I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n \n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next attacker.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself. A few more minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\n \n \n The shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside for a grip with my good hand.\n \n Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation. I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep\u2014\n \n I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between the cars. I caught the clear thought:\n \n \"God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right\u2014\"\n \n I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled steer.\n \n It was easy\u2014if I could only stay awake.\n \n I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide down into darkness.\n \n \n\n \n The car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation at the treatment it had received\u2014walking brace and all\u2014and the burned arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a badly embalmed mummy\u2014except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.\n \n I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would have finished me\u2014and the hapless fisherman\u2014right then. We rode out a couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the air.\n \n At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car\u2014with driver. He dropped me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me.\n \n Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of the farce.\n \n I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages.\n \n I needed new clothes\u2014or at least different ones\u2014and something to cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had recognized me at a glance.\n \n I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly worried\u2014at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself.\n \n The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes and let my awareness stretch out.\n \n \"\u2014 lousy job. What's the use? Little witch in the lunch room ... up in the hills, squirrel hunting, bottle of whiskey.... \"\n \n I settled into control gently, trying not to alarm the man. I saw through his eyes the dusty box car, the rust on the tracks, the listless weeds growing among cinders, and the weathered boards of the platform. I turned him, and saw the dingy glass of the telegraph window, a sagging screen door with a chipped enameled cola sign.\n \n I walked the man to the door, and through it. Behind a linoleum-topped counter, a coarse-skinned teen-age girl with heavy breasts and wet patches under her arms looked up without interest as the door banged.\n \n My host went on to the counter, gestured toward the waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches under a glass cover. \"I'll take 'em all. And candy bars, and cigarettes. And give me a big glass of water.\"\n \n \"Better git out there and look after yer train,\" the girl said carelessly. \"When'd you git so all-fired hungry all of a sudden?\"\n \n \"Put it in a bag. Quick.\"\n \n \"Look who's getting bossy\u2014\"\n \n My host rounded the counter, picked up a used paper bag, began stuffing food in it. The girl stared at him, then pushed him back. \"You git back around that counter!\"\n \n She filled the bag, took a pencil from behind her ear.\n \n \"That'll be one eighty-five. Cash.\"\n \n My host took two dog-eared bills from his shirt pocket, dropped them on the counter and waited while the girl filled a glass. He picked it up and started out.\n \n \"Hey! Where you goin' with my glass?\"\n \n The trainman crossed the platform, headed for the boxcar. He slid the loose door back a few inches against the slack latch, pushed the bag inside, placed the glass of water beside it, then pulled off his grimy railroader's cap and pushed it through the opening. He turned. The girl watched from the platform. A rattle passed down the line and the train started up with a lurch. The man walked back toward the girl. I heard him say: \"Friend o' mine in there\u2014just passin' through.\"\n \n I was discovering that it wasn't necessary to hold tight control over every move of a subject. Once given the impulse to act, he would rationalize his behavior, fill in the details\u2014and never know that the original idea hadn't been his own.\n \n I drank the water first, ate a sandwich, then lit a cigarette and lay back. So far so good. The crates in the car were marked \"U. S. Naval Aerospace Station, Bayou Le Cochon\". With any luck I'd reach New Orleans in another twelve hours. The first step of my plan included a raid on the Delta National Labs; but that was tomorrow. That could wait.\n \n \n\n \n It was a little before dawn when I crawled out of the car at a siding in the swampy country a few miles out of New Orleans. I wasn't feeling good, but I had a stake in staying on my feet. I still had a few miles in me. I had my supplies\u2014a few candy bars and some cigarettes\u2014stuffed in the pockets of the tattered issue coverall. Otherwise, I was unencumbered. Unless you wanted to count the walking brace on my right leg and the sling binding my arm.\n \n I picked my way across mushy ground to a pot-holed black-top road, started limping toward a few car lights visible half a mile away. It was already hot. The swamp air was like warmed-over subway fumes. Through the drugs, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my various wounds. I reached out and touched the driver's mind; he was thinking about shrimps, a fish-hook wound on his left thumb and a girl with black hair. \"Want a lift?\" he called.\n \n I thanked him and got in. He gave me a glance and I pinched off his budding twinge of curiosity. It was almost an effort now not to follow his thoughts. It was as though my mind, having learned the trick of communications with others, instinctively reached out toward them.\n \n An hour later he dropped me on a street corner in a shabby marketing district of the city and drove off. I hoped he made out all right with the dark-haired girl. I spotted a used-clothing store and headed for it.\n \n Twenty minutes later I was back on the sidewalk, dressed in a pinkish-gray suit that had been cut a long time ago by a Latin tailor\u2014maybe to settle a grudge. The shirt that went with it was an unsuccessful violet. The black string tie lent a dubious air of distinction. I'd swapped the railroader's cap for a tarnished beret. The man who had supplied the outfit was still asleep. I figured I'd done him a favor by taking it. I couldn't hope to pass for a fisherman\u2014I wasn't the type. Maybe I'd get by as a coffee-house derelict.\n \n I walked past fly-covered fish stalls, racks of faded garments, grimy vegetables in bins, enough paint-flaked wrought iron to cage a herd of brontosauri, and fetched up at a cab stand. I picked a fat driver with a wart.\n \n \"How much to the Delta National Laboratories?\"\n \n He rolled an eye toward me, shifted his toothpick.\n \n \"What ya wanna go out there for? Nothing out there.\"\n \n \"I'm a tourist,\" I said. \"They told me before I left home not to miss it.\"\n \n He grunted, reached back and opened the door. I got in. He flipped his flag down, started up with a clash of gears and pulled out without looking.\n \n \"How far is it?\" I asked him.\n \n \"It ain't far. Mile, mile and a quarter.\"\n \n \"Pretty big place, I guess.\"\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n We went through a warehousing district, swung left along the waterfront, bumped over railroad tracks, and pulled up at a nine-foot cyclone fence with a locked gate.\n \n \"A buck ten,\" my driver said.\n \n I looked out at the fence, a barren field, a distant group of low buildings. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"This is the place you ast for. That'll be a buck ten, mister.\"\n \n I touched his mind, planted a couple of false impressions and withdrew. He blinked, then started up, drove around the field, pulled up at an open gate with a blue-uniformed guard. He looked back at me.\n \n \"You want I should drive in, sir?\"\n \n \"I'll get out here.\"\n \n He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good elbow. \"I'll get your change, sir,\" he said, reaching for his hip.\n \n \"Keep it.\"\n \n \"Thank YOU.\" He hesitated. \"Maybe I oughta stick around. You know.\"\n \n \"I'll be all right.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" he said. \"A man like you\u2014you and me\u2014\" he winked. \"After all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing.\"\n \n \"True,\" I said. \"Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the sunrise and forget you ever saw me.\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Granthan learn, and use the Gool's mind control technique to his advantage?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31009, "query_start_index": 31011, "query_end_index": 31105, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "While searching his mind, Granthan finds a Gool, using this technique on him. He watches as the Gool traces out the pattern in his subconscious, studies and remembers it. He uses this new found skill to infiltrate the Gool's mind. In it he sees the Gool's home world, along with the rest of its colony, and a piece of theory that could win the war for Earth. When Granthan returns to the physical world to share the good news with Kayle, he is dismissed, and sentenced to death. Granthan flies onto Earth, reaches out with his mind, finding a Signal Officer. He convinces the officer to let him pass. He then infiltrates the mind of a radar man, forcing him to switch off the radar screens. When Kayle decides to send a fleet of missiles to Granthan's location in the pacific, Granthan reaches out with his mind, finds two men working in the control centre, and forces them to hit the self-destruct button on the bombs, saving his life. To escape his life boat, Granthan coerces a fisherman into taking him onboard, where they narrowly miss bombs being dropped on them. He then forces a driver to take him into town, convincing him that he was going to buy groceries. Granthan arrives at the train yard and uses his new power to defeat a guard who recognises Granthan, with a gun cocked towards him. While the train is stopped, he orders a man to buy him food, water and cigarettes, which the man delivers to him. When his train arrives in New Orleans, he forces a driver to take him into town, quickly diminishing his curiosity. When the cab driver arrives at the laboratories, Granthan finally convinces the man to drive around the field, leading to an open gate, where Granthan exits the car. "}
{"id": "51267_3", "pid": "51267_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nEND AS A HERO\n \n \n By KEITH LAUMER\n \n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Granthan's mission was the most vital of the war. It would mean instant victory\u2014but for whom?\n \n \n\n I\n \n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went on and on. And then I was awake\u2014and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me.\n \n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.\n \n I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch\u2014the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....\n \n There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again....\n \n \n\n \n I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm\u2014well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn't anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn't amputated. I wasn't complaining.\n \n As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool\u2014if I survived.\n \n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.\n \n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition\u2014with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull\u2014I shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar's CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here\u2014and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.\n \n I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look.\n \n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n \n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for an answer\u2014not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n \n \" Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh \u2014I think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me.\"\n \n I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed off\u2014and awoke with a start. Kayle was talking.\n \n \"\u2014your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n \n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled\u2014or croaked. But Kayle's voice was droning on:\n \n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack\u2014and came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.\n \n \"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility of\u2014what's that term you use?\u2014hyper-cortical invasion. You know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept the risk.\"\n \n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!\"\n \n Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and pretend\u2014right up until the warheads struck\u2014that I didn't know I'd been condemned to death.\n \n \n\n II\n \n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders.\n \n I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were mine, all mine....\n \n But how could I be sure of that?\n \n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tampering\u2014not at a conscious level.\n \n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mind\u2014and I had been prepared for just such an attack.\n \n Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious\u2014and see again what had happened.\n \n I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence....\n \n Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper....\n \n \n\n \n The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.\n \n And found it.\n \n As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations.\n \n I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.\n \n \" It is a contact, Effulgent One! \"\n \n \" Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the threshold.... \"\n \n \" It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough! \"\n \n A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the voices\u2014yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding stimuli\u2014then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me\u2014and then the hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought\u2014and the world-ending impact as I fell.\n \n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality lashed out again\u2014fighting the invader.\n \n \" Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one! \"\n \n \" Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force! \"\n \n Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering\u2014at a conscious level.\n \n Watching the Gool mind, I learned.\n \n The insinuating probe\u2014a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had theorized\u2014was no more than a pattern in emptiness....\n \n But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me.\n \n Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves.\n \n Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void\u2014and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape.\n \n There was a soundless shriek. \" Effulgence! It reached out\u2014touched me! \"\n \n \n\n \n Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia\u2014a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.\n \n I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind....\n \n I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a more favorable position.\n \n \n\n \n I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals\u2014riches beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe cluster\u2014those who remained of a once-great race\u2014at a single feeding trough. They would spread out across a galaxy\u2014and beyond.\n \n But not if I could help it.\n \n The Gool had evolved a plan\u2014but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n \n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough, perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n \n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see what I could steal.\n \n A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts, fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the concepts of an alien mind.\n \n I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.\n \n I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its meaning exploded in my mind.\n \n From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of their kind.\n \n Matter across space.\n \n \n\n \n \"You've got to listen to me, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I know you think I'm a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil\u2014and a few other things....\"\n \n I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sweated out his answer. I was getting close now. If he couldn't see the beauty of my proposal, my screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now.\n \n Kayle came back\u2014and his answer boiled down to \"no.\"\n \n I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex.\n \n I might have saved my breath.\n \n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n\"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n \n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the problem at hand.\n \n I keyed the chart file, flashed pages from the standard index on the reference screen, checking radar coverages, beacon ranges, monitor stations, controller fields. It looked as though a radar-negative boat the size of mine might possibly get through the defensive net with a daring pilot, and as a condemned spy, I could afford to be daring.\n \n And I had a few ideas.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The shrilling of the proximity alarm blasted through the silence. For a wild moment I thought Kayle had beaten me to the punch; then I realized it was the routine DEW line patrol contact.\n \n \"Z four-oh-two, I am reading your IFF. Decelerate at 1.8 gee preparatory to picking up approach orbit....\"\n \n The screen went on droning out instructions. I fed them into the autopilot, at the same time running over my approach plan. The scout was moving in closer. I licked dry lips. It was time to try.\n \n I closed my eyes, reached out\u2014as the Gool mind had reached out to me\u2014and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched keys, spoke into his microphone:\n \n \"As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down.\"\n \n I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line now, rapidly approaching atmosphere.\n \n \"Z four-oh-two,\" the speaker crackled. \"This is planetary control. I am picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down.\"\n \n There was a long pause. Then:\n \n \"Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!\"\n \n It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it dumb, and hope for a little luck.\n \n \"Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that, fellows. I'm a little banged up\u2014I guess I switched frequencies on you. What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?\"\n \n \"Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!\"\n \n \"Hey, you birds are mixed up,\" I protested. \"I'm cleared all the way. I checked in with DEW\u2014\"\n \n It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out\u2014\n \n A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar screens blanked off....\n \n For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up, over, buffeting me against the restraining harness.\n \n I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on the water.\n \n I would have to risk calling Kayle now\u2014but by voluntarily giving my position away, I should convince him I was still on our side\u2014and I was badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n \n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n \n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You penetrated the planetary defenses\u2014God knows how. I\u2014\"\n \n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other complaints.\"\n \n \"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it, Granthan.\"\n \n \n\n \n I felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already. Call them back! I have information that can win the war\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late\u2014even if I could take the chance you were right.\"\n \n A different face appeared on the screen.\n \n \"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and in the name of the President\u2014who has been apprised of this tragic situation\u2014it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor\u2014posthumously\u2014for your heroic effort. Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will, to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n \n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n \n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n \n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n \n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"\n \n I flipped the switch, sat gripping the couch, my stomach rising with each heave of the floating escape capsule. I had perhaps five minutes. The missiles would be from Canaveral.\n \n I closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, reached out....\n \n I sensed the distant shore, the hot buzz of human minds at work in the cities. I followed the coastline, found the Missile Base, flicked through the cluster of minds.\n \n \"\u2014 missile on course; do right, baby. That's it, right in the slot. \"\n \n I fingered my way through the man's mind and found the control centers. He turned stiffly from the plotting board, tottered to a panel to slam his hand against the destruct button.\n \n Men fell on him, dragged him back. \"\u2014 fool, why did you blow it? \"\n \n I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel, detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew. I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n \n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next attacker.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself. A few more minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\n \n \n The shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside for a grip with my good hand.\n \n Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation. I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep\u2014\n \n I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between the cars. I caught the clear thought:\n \n \"God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right\u2014\"\n \n I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled steer.\n \n It was easy\u2014if I could only stay awake.\n \n I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide down into darkness.\n \n \n\n \n The car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation at the treatment it had received\u2014walking brace and all\u2014and the burned arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a badly embalmed mummy\u2014except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.\n \n I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would have finished me\u2014and the hapless fisherman\u2014right then. We rode out a couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the air.\n \n At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car\u2014with driver. He dropped me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me.\n \n Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of the farce.\n \n I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages.\n \n I needed new clothes\u2014or at least different ones\u2014and something to cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had recognized me at a glance.\n \n I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly worried\u2014at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself.\n \n The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes and let my awareness stretch out.\n \n \"\u2014 lousy job. What's the use? Little witch in the lunch room ... up in the hills, squirrel hunting, bottle of whiskey.... \"\n \n I settled into control gently, trying not to alarm the man. I saw through his eyes the dusty box car, the rust on the tracks, the listless weeds growing among cinders, and the weathered boards of the platform. I turned him, and saw the dingy glass of the telegraph window, a sagging screen door with a chipped enameled cola sign.\n \n I walked the man to the door, and through it. Behind a linoleum-topped counter, a coarse-skinned teen-age girl with heavy breasts and wet patches under her arms looked up without interest as the door banged.\n \n My host went on to the counter, gestured toward the waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches under a glass cover. \"I'll take 'em all. And candy bars, and cigarettes. And give me a big glass of water.\"\n \n \"Better git out there and look after yer train,\" the girl said carelessly. \"When'd you git so all-fired hungry all of a sudden?\"\n \n \"Put it in a bag. Quick.\"\n \n \"Look who's getting bossy\u2014\"\n \n My host rounded the counter, picked up a used paper bag, began stuffing food in it. The girl stared at him, then pushed him back. \"You git back around that counter!\"\n \n She filled the bag, took a pencil from behind her ear.\n \n \"That'll be one eighty-five. Cash.\"\n \n My host took two dog-eared bills from his shirt pocket, dropped them on the counter and waited while the girl filled a glass. He picked it up and started out.\n \n \"Hey! Where you goin' with my glass?\"\n \n The trainman crossed the platform, headed for the boxcar. He slid the loose door back a few inches against the slack latch, pushed the bag inside, placed the glass of water beside it, then pulled off his grimy railroader's cap and pushed it through the opening. He turned. The girl watched from the platform. A rattle passed down the line and the train started up with a lurch. The man walked back toward the girl. I heard him say: \"Friend o' mine in there\u2014just passin' through.\"\n \n I was discovering that it wasn't necessary to hold tight control over every move of a subject. Once given the impulse to act, he would rationalize his behavior, fill in the details\u2014and never know that the original idea hadn't been his own.\n \n I drank the water first, ate a sandwich, then lit a cigarette and lay back. So far so good. The crates in the car were marked \"U. S. Naval Aerospace Station, Bayou Le Cochon\". With any luck I'd reach New Orleans in another twelve hours. The first step of my plan included a raid on the Delta National Labs; but that was tomorrow. That could wait.\n \n \n\n \n It was a little before dawn when I crawled out of the car at a siding in the swampy country a few miles out of New Orleans. I wasn't feeling good, but I had a stake in staying on my feet. I still had a few miles in me. I had my supplies\u2014a few candy bars and some cigarettes\u2014stuffed in the pockets of the tattered issue coverall. Otherwise, I was unencumbered. Unless you wanted to count the walking brace on my right leg and the sling binding my arm.\n \n I picked my way across mushy ground to a pot-holed black-top road, started limping toward a few car lights visible half a mile away. It was already hot. The swamp air was like warmed-over subway fumes. Through the drugs, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my various wounds. I reached out and touched the driver's mind; he was thinking about shrimps, a fish-hook wound on his left thumb and a girl with black hair. \"Want a lift?\" he called.\n \n I thanked him and got in. He gave me a glance and I pinched off his budding twinge of curiosity. It was almost an effort now not to follow his thoughts. It was as though my mind, having learned the trick of communications with others, instinctively reached out toward them.\n \n An hour later he dropped me on a street corner in a shabby marketing district of the city and drove off. I hoped he made out all right with the dark-haired girl. I spotted a used-clothing store and headed for it.\n \n Twenty minutes later I was back on the sidewalk, dressed in a pinkish-gray suit that had been cut a long time ago by a Latin tailor\u2014maybe to settle a grudge. The shirt that went with it was an unsuccessful violet. The black string tie lent a dubious air of distinction. I'd swapped the railroader's cap for a tarnished beret. The man who had supplied the outfit was still asleep. I figured I'd done him a favor by taking it. I couldn't hope to pass for a fisherman\u2014I wasn't the type. Maybe I'd get by as a coffee-house derelict.\n \n I walked past fly-covered fish stalls, racks of faded garments, grimy vegetables in bins, enough paint-flaked wrought iron to cage a herd of brontosauri, and fetched up at a cab stand. I picked a fat driver with a wart.\n \n \"How much to the Delta National Laboratories?\"\n \n He rolled an eye toward me, shifted his toothpick.\n \n \"What ya wanna go out there for? Nothing out there.\"\n \n \"I'm a tourist,\" I said. \"They told me before I left home not to miss it.\"\n \n He grunted, reached back and opened the door. I got in. He flipped his flag down, started up with a clash of gears and pulled out without looking.\n \n \"How far is it?\" I asked him.\n \n \"It ain't far. Mile, mile and a quarter.\"\n \n \"Pretty big place, I guess.\"\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n We went through a warehousing district, swung left along the waterfront, bumped over railroad tracks, and pulled up at a nine-foot cyclone fence with a locked gate.\n \n \"A buck ten,\" my driver said.\n \n I looked out at the fence, a barren field, a distant group of low buildings. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"This is the place you ast for. That'll be a buck ten, mister.\"\n \n I touched his mind, planted a couple of false impressions and withdrew. He blinked, then started up, drove around the field, pulled up at an open gate with a blue-uniformed guard. He looked back at me.\n \n \"You want I should drive in, sir?\"\n \n \"I'll get out here.\"\n \n He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good elbow. \"I'll get your change, sir,\" he said, reaching for his hip.\n \n \"Keep it.\"\n \n \"Thank YOU.\" He hesitated. \"Maybe I oughta stick around. You know.\"\n \n \"I'll be all right.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" he said. \"A man like you\u2014you and me\u2014\" he winked. \"After all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing.\"\n \n \"True,\" I said. \"Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the sunrise and forget you ever saw me.\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Granthan learn, and use the Gool's mind control technique to his advantage?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31009, "query_start_index": 31011, "query_end_index": 31105, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Granthan initially tries to use his psychodynamic abilities to go back into his subconscious and find hidden memories of his interaction with the Gool. While in his subconscious, he is able to witness how the Gool probed his mind to control it. By seeing the techniques used by the Gool, Granthan is able to replicate it using his knowledge of psychodynamics, and through this, he probes the mind of the Gool and realizes that he has mastered the practice. Granthan uses this new ability to his advantage, particularly by mind controlling the officers that are ordered to prevent him from entering Earth and execute him. He also uses the ability through his escape route, controlling drivers, train conductors, and other passerby to help advance himself."}
{"id": "51267_3", "pid": "51267_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nEND AS A HERO\n \n \n By KEITH LAUMER\n \n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Granthan's mission was the most vital of the war. It would mean instant victory\u2014but for whom?\n \n \n\n I\n \n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went on and on. And then I was awake\u2014and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me.\n \n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.\n \n I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch\u2014the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....\n \n There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again....\n \n \n\n \n I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm\u2014well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn't anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn't amputated. I wasn't complaining.\n \n As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool\u2014if I survived.\n \n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.\n \n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition\u2014with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull\u2014I shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar's CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here\u2014and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.\n \n I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look.\n \n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n \n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for an answer\u2014not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n \n \" Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh \u2014I think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me.\"\n \n I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed off\u2014and awoke with a start. Kayle was talking.\n \n \"\u2014your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n \n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled\u2014or croaked. But Kayle's voice was droning on:\n \n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack\u2014and came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.\n \n \"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility of\u2014what's that term you use?\u2014hyper-cortical invasion. You know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept the risk.\"\n \n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!\"\n \n Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and pretend\u2014right up until the warheads struck\u2014that I didn't know I'd been condemned to death.\n \n \n\n II\n \n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders.\n \n I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were mine, all mine....\n \n But how could I be sure of that?\n \n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tampering\u2014not at a conscious level.\n \n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mind\u2014and I had been prepared for just such an attack.\n \n Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious\u2014and see again what had happened.\n \n I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence....\n \n Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper....\n \n \n\n \n The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.\n \n And found it.\n \n As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations.\n \n I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.\n \n \" It is a contact, Effulgent One! \"\n \n \" Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the threshold.... \"\n \n \" It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough! \"\n \n A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the voices\u2014yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding stimuli\u2014then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me\u2014and then the hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought\u2014and the world-ending impact as I fell.\n \n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality lashed out again\u2014fighting the invader.\n \n \" Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one! \"\n \n \" Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force! \"\n \n Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering\u2014at a conscious level.\n \n Watching the Gool mind, I learned.\n \n The insinuating probe\u2014a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had theorized\u2014was no more than a pattern in emptiness....\n \n But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me.\n \n Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves.\n \n Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void\u2014and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape.\n \n There was a soundless shriek. \" Effulgence! It reached out\u2014touched me! \"\n \n \n\n \n Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia\u2014a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.\n \n I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind....\n \n I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a more favorable position.\n \n \n\n \n I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals\u2014riches beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe cluster\u2014those who remained of a once-great race\u2014at a single feeding trough. They would spread out across a galaxy\u2014and beyond.\n \n But not if I could help it.\n \n The Gool had evolved a plan\u2014but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n \n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough, perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n \n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see what I could steal.\n \n A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts, fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the concepts of an alien mind.\n \n I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.\n \n I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its meaning exploded in my mind.\n \n From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of their kind.\n \n Matter across space.\n \n \n\n \n \"You've got to listen to me, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I know you think I'm a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil\u2014and a few other things....\"\n \n I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sweated out his answer. I was getting close now. If he couldn't see the beauty of my proposal, my screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now.\n \n Kayle came back\u2014and his answer boiled down to \"no.\"\n \n I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex.\n \n I might have saved my breath.\n \n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n\"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n \n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the problem at hand.\n \n I keyed the chart file, flashed pages from the standard index on the reference screen, checking radar coverages, beacon ranges, monitor stations, controller fields. It looked as though a radar-negative boat the size of mine might possibly get through the defensive net with a daring pilot, and as a condemned spy, I could afford to be daring.\n \n And I had a few ideas.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The shrilling of the proximity alarm blasted through the silence. For a wild moment I thought Kayle had beaten me to the punch; then I realized it was the routine DEW line patrol contact.\n \n \"Z four-oh-two, I am reading your IFF. Decelerate at 1.8 gee preparatory to picking up approach orbit....\"\n \n The screen went on droning out instructions. I fed them into the autopilot, at the same time running over my approach plan. The scout was moving in closer. I licked dry lips. It was time to try.\n \n I closed my eyes, reached out\u2014as the Gool mind had reached out to me\u2014and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched keys, spoke into his microphone:\n \n \"As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down.\"\n \n I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line now, rapidly approaching atmosphere.\n \n \"Z four-oh-two,\" the speaker crackled. \"This is planetary control. I am picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down.\"\n \n There was a long pause. Then:\n \n \"Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!\"\n \n It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it dumb, and hope for a little luck.\n \n \"Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that, fellows. I'm a little banged up\u2014I guess I switched frequencies on you. What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?\"\n \n \"Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!\"\n \n \"Hey, you birds are mixed up,\" I protested. \"I'm cleared all the way. I checked in with DEW\u2014\"\n \n It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out\u2014\n \n A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar screens blanked off....\n \n For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up, over, buffeting me against the restraining harness.\n \n I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on the water.\n \n I would have to risk calling Kayle now\u2014but by voluntarily giving my position away, I should convince him I was still on our side\u2014and I was badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n \n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n \n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You penetrated the planetary defenses\u2014God knows how. I\u2014\"\n \n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other complaints.\"\n \n \"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it, Granthan.\"\n \n \n\n \n I felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already. Call them back! I have information that can win the war\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late\u2014even if I could take the chance you were right.\"\n \n A different face appeared on the screen.\n \n \"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and in the name of the President\u2014who has been apprised of this tragic situation\u2014it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor\u2014posthumously\u2014for your heroic effort. Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will, to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n \n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n \n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n \n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n \n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"\n \n I flipped the switch, sat gripping the couch, my stomach rising with each heave of the floating escape capsule. I had perhaps five minutes. The missiles would be from Canaveral.\n \n I closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, reached out....\n \n I sensed the distant shore, the hot buzz of human minds at work in the cities. I followed the coastline, found the Missile Base, flicked through the cluster of minds.\n \n \"\u2014 missile on course; do right, baby. That's it, right in the slot. \"\n \n I fingered my way through the man's mind and found the control centers. He turned stiffly from the plotting board, tottered to a panel to slam his hand against the destruct button.\n \n Men fell on him, dragged him back. \"\u2014 fool, why did you blow it? \"\n \n I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel, detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew. I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n \n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next attacker.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself. A few more minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\n \n \n The shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside for a grip with my good hand.\n \n Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation. I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep\u2014\n \n I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between the cars. I caught the clear thought:\n \n \"God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right\u2014\"\n \n I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled steer.\n \n It was easy\u2014if I could only stay awake.\n \n I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide down into darkness.\n \n \n\n \n The car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation at the treatment it had received\u2014walking brace and all\u2014and the burned arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a badly embalmed mummy\u2014except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.\n \n I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would have finished me\u2014and the hapless fisherman\u2014right then. We rode out a couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the air.\n \n At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car\u2014with driver. He dropped me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me.\n \n Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of the farce.\n \n I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages.\n \n I needed new clothes\u2014or at least different ones\u2014and something to cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had recognized me at a glance.\n \n I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly worried\u2014at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself.\n \n The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes and let my awareness stretch out.\n \n \"\u2014 lousy job. What's the use? Little witch in the lunch room ... up in the hills, squirrel hunting, bottle of whiskey.... \"\n \n I settled into control gently, trying not to alarm the man. I saw through his eyes the dusty box car, the rust on the tracks, the listless weeds growing among cinders, and the weathered boards of the platform. I turned him, and saw the dingy glass of the telegraph window, a sagging screen door with a chipped enameled cola sign.\n \n I walked the man to the door, and through it. Behind a linoleum-topped counter, a coarse-skinned teen-age girl with heavy breasts and wet patches under her arms looked up without interest as the door banged.\n \n My host went on to the counter, gestured toward the waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches under a glass cover. \"I'll take 'em all. And candy bars, and cigarettes. And give me a big glass of water.\"\n \n \"Better git out there and look after yer train,\" the girl said carelessly. \"When'd you git so all-fired hungry all of a sudden?\"\n \n \"Put it in a bag. Quick.\"\n \n \"Look who's getting bossy\u2014\"\n \n My host rounded the counter, picked up a used paper bag, began stuffing food in it. The girl stared at him, then pushed him back. \"You git back around that counter!\"\n \n She filled the bag, took a pencil from behind her ear.\n \n \"That'll be one eighty-five. Cash.\"\n \n My host took two dog-eared bills from his shirt pocket, dropped them on the counter and waited while the girl filled a glass. He picked it up and started out.\n \n \"Hey! Where you goin' with my glass?\"\n \n The trainman crossed the platform, headed for the boxcar. He slid the loose door back a few inches against the slack latch, pushed the bag inside, placed the glass of water beside it, then pulled off his grimy railroader's cap and pushed it through the opening. He turned. The girl watched from the platform. A rattle passed down the line and the train started up with a lurch. The man walked back toward the girl. I heard him say: \"Friend o' mine in there\u2014just passin' through.\"\n \n I was discovering that it wasn't necessary to hold tight control over every move of a subject. Once given the impulse to act, he would rationalize his behavior, fill in the details\u2014and never know that the original idea hadn't been his own.\n \n I drank the water first, ate a sandwich, then lit a cigarette and lay back. So far so good. The crates in the car were marked \"U. S. Naval Aerospace Station, Bayou Le Cochon\". With any luck I'd reach New Orleans in another twelve hours. The first step of my plan included a raid on the Delta National Labs; but that was tomorrow. That could wait.\n \n \n\n \n It was a little before dawn when I crawled out of the car at a siding in the swampy country a few miles out of New Orleans. I wasn't feeling good, but I had a stake in staying on my feet. I still had a few miles in me. I had my supplies\u2014a few candy bars and some cigarettes\u2014stuffed in the pockets of the tattered issue coverall. Otherwise, I was unencumbered. Unless you wanted to count the walking brace on my right leg and the sling binding my arm.\n \n I picked my way across mushy ground to a pot-holed black-top road, started limping toward a few car lights visible half a mile away. It was already hot. The swamp air was like warmed-over subway fumes. Through the drugs, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my various wounds. I reached out and touched the driver's mind; he was thinking about shrimps, a fish-hook wound on his left thumb and a girl with black hair. \"Want a lift?\" he called.\n \n I thanked him and got in. He gave me a glance and I pinched off his budding twinge of curiosity. It was almost an effort now not to follow his thoughts. It was as though my mind, having learned the trick of communications with others, instinctively reached out toward them.\n \n An hour later he dropped me on a street corner in a shabby marketing district of the city and drove off. I hoped he made out all right with the dark-haired girl. I spotted a used-clothing store and headed for it.\n \n Twenty minutes later I was back on the sidewalk, dressed in a pinkish-gray suit that had been cut a long time ago by a Latin tailor\u2014maybe to settle a grudge. The shirt that went with it was an unsuccessful violet. The black string tie lent a dubious air of distinction. I'd swapped the railroader's cap for a tarnished beret. The man who had supplied the outfit was still asleep. I figured I'd done him a favor by taking it. I couldn't hope to pass for a fisherman\u2014I wasn't the type. Maybe I'd get by as a coffee-house derelict.\n \n I walked past fly-covered fish stalls, racks of faded garments, grimy vegetables in bins, enough paint-flaked wrought iron to cage a herd of brontosauri, and fetched up at a cab stand. I picked a fat driver with a wart.\n \n \"How much to the Delta National Laboratories?\"\n \n He rolled an eye toward me, shifted his toothpick.\n \n \"What ya wanna go out there for? Nothing out there.\"\n \n \"I'm a tourist,\" I said. \"They told me before I left home not to miss it.\"\n \n He grunted, reached back and opened the door. I got in. He flipped his flag down, started up with a clash of gears and pulled out without looking.\n \n \"How far is it?\" I asked him.\n \n \"It ain't far. Mile, mile and a quarter.\"\n \n \"Pretty big place, I guess.\"\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n We went through a warehousing district, swung left along the waterfront, bumped over railroad tracks, and pulled up at a nine-foot cyclone fence with a locked gate.\n \n \"A buck ten,\" my driver said.\n \n I looked out at the fence, a barren field, a distant group of low buildings. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"This is the place you ast for. That'll be a buck ten, mister.\"\n \n I touched his mind, planted a couple of false impressions and withdrew. He blinked, then started up, drove around the field, pulled up at an open gate with a blue-uniformed guard. He looked back at me.\n \n \"You want I should drive in, sir?\"\n \n \"I'll get out here.\"\n \n He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good elbow. \"I'll get your change, sir,\" he said, reaching for his hip.\n \n \"Keep it.\"\n \n \"Thank YOU.\" He hesitated. \"Maybe I oughta stick around. You know.\"\n \n \"I'll be all right.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" he said. \"A man like you\u2014you and me\u2014\" he winked. \"After all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing.\"\n \n \"True,\" I said. \"Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the sunrise and forget you ever saw me.\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Granthan learn, and use the Gool's mind control technique to his advantage?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31009, "query_start_index": 31011, "query_end_index": 31105, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Granthan learns about the mind control techniques by going deeper into his subconscious mind and seeing the Gool withdrawing from him without his consciousness being aware of it. He realizes that he can do the same thing as the Gool. Then he decides to use the mind control to his own advantage by mind controlling people so that he can do things as he wish. \n\nFirstly, Granthan was able to use what he learned to spy on the Gool and learn about matter transmission. Later, he uses the mind control abilities during his escape. He first tries to control the Signal Officer to allow him to pass the outer line of defense. Then, he mind controls the radar man to make his radar disappear so that his location will not be exposed; he controls the  control center man, and he destroys one of the missiles; he prevents many attackers from attacking him while inside the capsule. Later on the train, he controls a man for food. Through practice, Granthan also discovers that the person being controlled can behave rationally once an impulse to act is given; there is no need for complete control over the person. At New Orleans, he controls a taxi driver to take him to the gate of Delta National Laboratories and makes him forget that he ever saw Granthan. "}
{"id": "51267_3", "pid": "51267_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nEND AS A HERO\n \n \n By KEITH LAUMER\n \n Illustrated by SCHELLING\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n Granthan's mission was the most vital of the war. It would mean instant victory\u2014but for whom?\n \n \n\n I\n \n In the dream I was swimming in a river of white fire and the dream went on and on. And then I was awake\u2014and the fire was still there, fiercely burning at me.\n \n I tried to move to get away from the flames, and then the real pain hit me. I tried to go back to sleep and the relative comfort of the river of fire, but it was no go. For better or worse, I was alive and conscious.\n \n I opened my eyes and took a look around. I was on the floor next to an unpadded acceleration couch\u2014the kind the Terrestrial Space Arm installs in seldom-used lifeboats. There were three more couches, but no one in them. I tried to sit up. It wasn't easy but, by applying a lot more will-power than should be required of a sick man, I made it. I took a look at my left arm. Baked. The hand was only medium rare, but the forearm was black, with deep red showing at the bottom of the cracks where the crisped upper layers had burst....\n \n There was a first-aid cabinet across the compartment from me. I tried my right leg, felt broken bone-ends grate with a sensation that transcended pain. I heaved with the other leg, scrabbled with the charred arm. The crawl to the cabinet dwarfed Hillary's trek up Everest, but I reached it after a couple of years, and found the microswitch on the floor that activated the thing, and then I was fading out again....\n \n \n\n \n I came out of it clear-headed but weak. My right leg was numb, but reasonably comfortable, clamped tight in a walking brace. I put up a hand and felt a shaved skull, with sutures. It must have been a fracture. The left arm\u2014well, it was still there, wrapped to the shoulder and held out stiffly by a power truss that would keep the scar tissue from pulling up and crippling me. The steady pressure as the truss contracted wasn't anything to do a sense-tape on for replaying at leisure moments, but at least the cabinet hadn't amputated. I wasn't complaining.\n \n As far as I knew, I was the first recorded survivor of contact with the Gool\u2014if I survived.\n \n I was still a long way from home, and I hadn't yet checked on the condition of the lifeboat. I glanced toward the entry port. It was dogged shut. I could see black marks where my burned hand had been at work.\n \n I fumbled my way into a couch and tried to think. In my condition\u2014with a broken leg and third-degree burns, plus a fractured skull\u2014I shouldn't have been able to fall out of bed, much less make the trip from Belshazzar's CCC to the boat; and how had I managed to dog that port shut? In an emergency a man was capable of great exertions. But running on a broken femur, handling heavy levers with charred fingers and thinking with a cracked head were overdoing it. Still, I was here\u2014and it was time to get a call through to TSA headquarters.\n \n I flipped the switch and gave the emergency call-letters Col. Ausar Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence had assigned to me a few weeks before. It was almost five minutes before the \"acknowledge\" came through from the Ganymede relay station, another ten minutes before Kayle's face swam into view. Even through the blur of the screen I could see the haggard look.\n \n \"Granthan!\" he burst out. \"Where are the others? What happened out there?\" I turned him down to a mutter.\n \n \"Hold on,\" I said. \"I'll tell you. Recorders going?\" I didn't wait for an answer\u2014not with a fifteen-minute transmission lag. I plowed on:\n \n \" Belshazzar was sabotaged. So was Gilgamesh \u2014I think. I got out. I lost a little skin, but the aid cabinet has the case in hand. Tell the Med people the drinks are on me.\"\n \n I finished talking and flopped back, waiting for Kayle's reply. On the screen, his flickering image gazed back impatiently, looking as hostile as a swing-shift ward nurse. It would be half an hour before I would get his reaction to my report. I dozed off\u2014and awoke with a start. Kayle was talking.\n \n \"\u2014your report. I won't mince words. They're wondering at your role in the disaster. How does it happen that you alone survived?\"\n \n \"How the hell do I know?\" I yelled\u2014or croaked. But Kayle's voice was droning on:\n \n \"... you Psychodynamics people have been telling me the Gool may have some kind of long-range telehypnotic ability that might make it possible for them to subvert a loyal man without his knowledge. You've told me yourself that you blacked out during the attack\u2014and came to on the lifeboat, with no recollection of how you got there.\n \n \"This is war, Granthan. War against a vicious enemy who strike without warning and without mercy. You were sent out to investigate the possibility of\u2014what's that term you use?\u2014hyper-cortical invasion. You know better than most the risk I'd be running if you were allowed to pass the patrol line.\n \n \"I'm sorry, Granthan. I can't let you land on Earth. I can't accept the risk.\"\n \n \"What do I do now?\" I stormed. \"Go into orbit and eat pills and hope you think of something? I need a doctor!\"\n \n Presently Kayle replied. \"Yes,\" he said. \"You'll have to enter a parking orbit. Perhaps there will be developments soon which will make it possible to ... ah ... restudy the situation.\" He didn't meet my eye. I knew what he was thinking. He'd spare me the mental anguish of knowing what was coming. I couldn't really blame him; he was doing what he thought was the right thing. And I'd have to go along and pretend\u2014right up until the warheads struck\u2014that I didn't know I'd been condemned to death.\n \n \n\n II\n \n I tried to gather my wits and think my way through the situation. I was alone and injured, aboard a lifeboat that would be the focus of a converging flight of missiles as soon as I approached within battery range of Earth. I had gotten clear of the Gool, but I wouldn't survive my next meeting with my own kind. They couldn't take the chance that I was acting under Gool orders.\n \n I wasn't, of course. I was still the same Peter Granthan, psychodynamicist, who had started out with Dayan's fleet six weeks earlier. The thoughts I was having weren't brilliant, but they were mine, all mine....\n \n But how could I be sure of that?\n \n Maybe there was something in Kayle's suspicion. If the Gool were as skillful as we thought, they would have left no overt indications of their tampering\u2014not at a conscious level.\n \n But this was where psychodynamics training came in. I had been reacting like any scared casualty, aching to get home and lick his wounds. But I wasn't just any casualty. I had been trained in the subtleties of the mind\u2014and I had been prepared for just such an attack.\n \n Now was the time to make use of that training. It had given me one resource. I could unlock the memories of my subconscious\u2014and see again what had happened.\n \n I lay back, cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts, and concentrated on the trigger word that would key an auto-hypnotic sequence....\n \n Sense impressions faded. I was alone in the nebulous emptiness of a first-level trance. I keyed a second word, slipped below the misty surface into a dreamworld of vague phantasmagoric figures milling in their limbo of sub-conceptualization. I penetrated deeper, broke through into the vividly hallucinatory third level, where images of mirror-bright immediacy clamored for attention. And deeper....\n \n \n\n \n The immense orderly confusion of the basic memory level lay before me. Abstracted from it, aloof and observant, the monitoring personality-fraction scanned the pattern, searching the polydimensional continuum for evidence of an alien intrusion.\n \n And found it.\n \n As the eye instantaneously detects a flicker of motion amid an infinity of static detail, so my inner eye perceived the subtle traces of the probing Gool mind, like a whispered touch deftly rearranging my buried motivations.\n \n I focused selectively, tuned to the recorded gestalt.\n \n \" It is a contact, Effulgent One! \"\n \n \" Softly, now! Nurture the spark well. It but trembles at the threshold.... \"\n \n \" It is elusive, Master! It wriggles like a gorm-worm in the eating trough! \"\n \n A part of my mind watched as the memory unreeled. I listened to the voices\u2014yet not voices, merely the shape of concepts, indescribably intricate. I saw how the decoy pseudo-personality which I had concretized for the purpose in a hundred training sessions had fought against the intruding stimuli\u2014then yielded under the relentless thrust of the alien probe. I watched as the Gool operator took over the motor centers, caused me to crawl through the choking smoke of the devastated control compartment toward the escape hatch. Fire leaped up, blocking the way. I went on, felt ghostly flames whipping at me\u2014and then the hatch was open and I pulled myself through, forcing the broken leg. My blackened hand fumbled at the locking wheel. Then the blast as the lifeboat leaped clear of the disintegrating dreadnought\u2014and the world-ending impact as I fell.\n \n At a level far below the conscious, the embattled pseudo-personality lashed out again\u2014fighting the invader.\n \n \" Almost it eluded me then, Effulgent Lord. Link with this lowly one! \"\n \n \" Impossible! Do you forget all my teachings? Cling, though you expend the last filament of your life-force! \"\n \n Free from all distraction, at a level where comprehension and retention are instantaneous and total, my monitoring basic personality fraction followed the skillful Gool mind as it engraved its commands deep in my subconscious. Then the touch withdrew, erasing the scars of its passage, to leave me unaware of its tampering\u2014at a conscious level.\n \n Watching the Gool mind, I learned.\n \n The insinuating probe\u2014a concept regarding which psychodynamicists had theorized\u2014was no more than a pattern in emptiness....\n \n But a pattern which I could duplicate, now that I had seen what had been done to me.\n \n Hesitantly, I felt for the immaterial fabric of the continuum, warping and manipulating it, copying the Gool probe. Like planes of paper-thin crystal, the polyfinite aspects of reality shifted into focus, aligning themselves.\n \n Abruptly, a channel lay open. As easily as I would stretch out my hand to pluck a moth from a night-flower, I reached across the unimaginable void\u2014and sensed a pit blacker than the bottom floor of hell, and a glistening dark shape.\n \n There was a soundless shriek. \" Effulgence! It reached out\u2014touched me! \"\n \n \n\n \n Using the technique I had grasped from the Gool itself, I struck, stifling the outcry, invaded the fetid blackness and grappled the obscene gelatinous immensity of the Gool spy as it spasmed in a frenzy of xenophobia\u2014a ton of liver writhing at the bottom of a dark well.\n \n I clamped down control. The Gool mind folded in on itself, gibbering. Not pausing to rest, I followed up, probed along my channel of contact, tracing patterns, scanning the flaccid Gool mind....\n \n I saw a world of yellow seas lapping at endless shores of mud. There was a fuming pit, where liquid sulphur bubbled up from some inner source, filling an immense natural basin. The Gool clustered at its rim, feeding, each monstrous shape heaving against its neighbors for a more favorable position.\n \n \n\n \n I probed farther, saw the great cables of living nervous tissue that linked each eating organ with the brain-mass far underground. I traced the passages through which tendrils ran out to immense caverns where smaller creatures labored over strange devices. These, my host's memory told me, were the young of the Gool. Here they built the fleets that would transport the spawn to the new worlds the Prime Overlord had discovered, worlds where food was free for the taking. Not sulphur alone, but potassium, calcium, iron and all the metals\u2014riches beyond belief in endless profusion. No longer would the Gool tribe cluster\u2014those who remained of a once-great race\u2014at a single feeding trough. They would spread out across a galaxy\u2014and beyond.\n \n But not if I could help it.\n \n The Gool had evolved a plan\u2014but they'd had a stroke of bad luck.\n \n In the past, they had managed to control a man here and there, among the fleets, far from home, but only at a superficial level. Enough, perhaps, to wreck a ship, but not the complete control needed to send a man back to Earth under Gool compulsion, to carry out complex sabotage.\n \n Then they had found me, alone, a sole survivor, free from the clutter of the other mind-fields. It had been their misfortune to pick a psychodynamicist. Instead of gaining a patient slave, they had opened the fortress door to an unseen spy. Now that I was there, I would see what I could steal.\n \n A timeless time passed. I wandered among patterns of white light and white sound, plumbed the deepest recesses of hidden Gool thoughts, fared along strange ways examining the shapes and colors of the concepts of an alien mind.\n \n I paused at last, scanning a multi-ordinal structure of pattern within pattern; the diagrammed circuits of a strange machine.\n \n I followed through its logic-sequence; and, like a bomb-burst, its meaning exploded in my mind.\n \n From the vile nest deep under the dark surface of the Gool world in its lonely trans-Plutonian orbit, I had plucked the ultimate secret of their kind.\n \n Matter across space.\n \n \n\n \n \"You've got to listen to me, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I know you think I'm a Gool robot. But what I have is too big to let you blow it up without a fight. Matter transmission! You know what that can mean to us. The concept is too complex to try to describe in words. You'll have to take my word for it. I can build it, though, using standard components, plus an infinite-area antenna and a moebius-wound coil\u2014and a few other things....\"\n \n I harangued Kayle for a while, and then sweated out his answer. I was getting close now. If he couldn't see the beauty of my proposal, my screens would start to register the radiation of warheads any time now.\n \n Kayle came back\u2014and his answer boiled down to \"no.\"\n \n I tried to reason with him. I reminded him how I had readied myself for the trip with sessions on the encephaloscope, setting up the cross-networks of conditioned defensive responses, the shunt circuits to the decoy pseudo-personality, leaving my volitional ego free. I talked about subliminal hypnotics and the resilience quotient of the ego-complex.\n \n I might have saved my breath.\n \n \"I don't understand that psychodynamics jargon, Granthan,\" he snapped.\n\"It smacks of mysticism. But I understand what the Gool have done to you well enough. I'm sorry.\"\n \n I leaned back and chewed the inside of my lip and thought unkind thoughts about Colonel Ausar Kayle. Then I settled down to solve the problem at hand.\n \n I keyed the chart file, flashed pages from the standard index on the reference screen, checking radar coverages, beacon ranges, monitor stations, controller fields. It looked as though a radar-negative boat the size of mine might possibly get through the defensive net with a daring pilot, and as a condemned spy, I could afford to be daring.\n \n And I had a few ideas.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The shrilling of the proximity alarm blasted through the silence. For a wild moment I thought Kayle had beaten me to the punch; then I realized it was the routine DEW line patrol contact.\n \n \"Z four-oh-two, I am reading your IFF. Decelerate at 1.8 gee preparatory to picking up approach orbit....\"\n \n The screen went on droning out instructions. I fed them into the autopilot, at the same time running over my approach plan. The scout was moving in closer. I licked dry lips. It was time to try.\n \n I closed my eyes, reached out\u2014as the Gool mind had reached out to me\u2014and felt the touch of a Signals Officer's mind, forty thousand miles distant, aboard the patrol vessel. There was a brief flurry of struggle; then I dictated my instructions. The Signals Officer punched keys, spoke into his microphone:\n \n \"As you were, Z four-oh-two. Continue on present course. At Oh-nineteen seconds, pick up planetary for re-entry and let-down.\"\n \n I blanked out the man's recollection of what had happened, caught his belated puzzlement as I broke contact. But I was clear of the DEW line now, rapidly approaching atmosphere.\n \n \"Z four-oh-two,\" the speaker crackled. \"This is planetary control. I am picking you up on channel forty-three, for re-entry and let-down.\"\n \n There was a long pause. Then:\n \n \"Z four-oh-two, countermand DEW Line clearance! Repeat, clearance countermanded! Emergency course change to standard hyperbolic code ninety-eight. Do not attempt re-entry. Repeat: do not attempt re-entry!\"\n \n It hadn't taken Kayle long to see that I'd gotten past the outer line of defense. A few more minutes' grace would have helped. I'd play it dumb, and hope for a little luck.\n \n \"Planetary, Z four-oh-two here. Say, I'm afraid I missed part of that, fellows. I'm a little banged up\u2014I guess I switched frequencies on you. What was that after 'pick up channel forty-three'...?\"\n \n \"Four-oh-two, sheer off there! You're not cleared for re-entry!\"\n \n \"Hey, you birds are mixed up,\" I protested. \"I'm cleared all the way. I checked in with DEW\u2014\"\n \n It was time to disappear. I blanked off all transmission, hit the controls, following my evasive pattern. And again I reached out\u2014\n \n A radar man at a site in the Pacific, fifteen thousand miles away, rose from his chair, crossed the darkened room and threw a switch. The radar screens blanked off....\n \n For an hour I rode the long orbit down, fending off attack after attack. Then I was clear, skimming the surface of the ocean a few miles southeast of Key West. The boat hit hard. I felt the floor rise up, over, buffeting me against the restraining harness.\n \n I hauled at the release lever, felt a long moment of giddy disorientation as the escape capsule separated from the sinking lifeboat deep under the surface. Then my escape capsule was bobbing on the water.\n \n I would have to risk calling Kayle now\u2014but by voluntarily giving my position away, I should convince him I was still on our side\u2014and I was badly in need of a pick-up. I flipped the sending key.\n \n \"This is Z four-oh-two,\" I said. \"I have an urgent report for Colonel Kayle of Aerospace Intelligence.\"\n \n Kayle's face appeared. \"Don't fight it, Granthan,\" he croaked. \"You penetrated the planetary defenses\u2014God knows how. I\u2014\"\n \n \"Later,\" I snapped. \"How about calling off your dogs now? And send somebody out here to pick me up, before I add sea-sickness to my other complaints.\"\n \n \"We have you pinpointed,\" Kayle cut in. \"It's no use fighting it, Granthan.\"\n \n \n\n \n I felt cold sweat pop out on my forehead. \"You've got to listen, Kayle,\" I shouted. \"I suppose you've got missiles on the way already. Call them back! I have information that can win the war\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm sorry, Granthan,\" Kayle said. \"It's too late\u2014even if I could take the chance you were right.\"\n \n A different face appeared on the screen.\n \n \"Mr. Granthan, I am General Titus. On behalf of your country, and in the name of the President\u2014who has been apprised of this tragic situation\u2014it is my privilege to inform you that you will be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor\u2014posthumously\u2014for your heroic effort. Although you failed, and have in fact been forced, against your will, to carry out the schemes of the inhuman enemy, this in no way detracts from your gallant attempt. Mr. Granthan, I salute you.\"\n \n The general's arm went up in a rigid gesture.\n \n \"Stow that, you pompous idiot!\" I barked. \"I'm no spy!\"\n \n Kayle was back, blanking out the startled face of the general.\n \n \"Goodbye, Granthan. Try to understand....\"\n \n I flipped the switch, sat gripping the couch, my stomach rising with each heave of the floating escape capsule. I had perhaps five minutes. The missiles would be from Canaveral.\n \n I closed my eyes, forced myself to relax, reached out....\n \n I sensed the distant shore, the hot buzz of human minds at work in the cities. I followed the coastline, found the Missile Base, flicked through the cluster of minds.\n \n \"\u2014 missile on course; do right, baby. That's it, right in the slot. \"\n \n I fingered my way through the man's mind and found the control centers. He turned stiffly from the plotting board, tottered to a panel to slam his hand against the destruct button.\n \n Men fell on him, dragged him back. \"\u2014 fool, why did you blow it? \"\n \n I dropped the contact, found another, who leaped to the panel, detonated the remainder of the flight of six missiles. Then I withdrew. I would have a few minutes' stay of execution now.\n \n I was ten miles from shore. The capsule had its own power plant. I started it up, switched on the external viewer. I saw dark sea, the glint of star-light on the choppy surface, in the distance a glow on the horizon that would be Key West. I plugged the course into the pilot, then leaned back and felt outward with my mind for the next attacker.\n \n \n\n IV\n \n It was dark in the trainyard. I moved along the tracks in a stumbling walk. Just a few more minutes, I was telling myself. A few more minutes and you can lie down ... rest....\n \n \n The shadowed bulk of a box car loomed up, its open door a blacker square. I leaned against the sill, breathing hard, then reached inside for a grip with my good hand.\n \n Gravel scrunched nearby. The beam of a flashlight lanced out, slipped along the weathered car, caught me. There was a startled exclamation. I ducked back, closed my eyes, felt out for his mind. There was a confused murmur of thought, a random intrusion of impressions from the city all around. It was hard, too hard. I had to sleep\u2014\n \n I heard the snick of a revolver being cocked, and dropped flat as a gout of flame stabbed toward me, the imperative Bam! echoing between the cars. I caught the clear thought:\n \n \"God-awful looking, shaved head, arm stuck out; him all right\u2014\"\n \n I reached out to his mind and struck at random. The light fell, went out, and I heard the unconscious body slam to the ground like a poled steer.\n \n It was easy\u2014if I could only stay awake.\n \n I gritted my teeth, pulled myself into the car, crawled to a dark corner behind a crate and slumped down. I tried to evoke a personality fraction to set as a guard, a part of my mind to stay awake and warn me of danger. It was too much trouble. I relaxed and let it all slide down into darkness.\n \n \n\n \n The car swayed, click-clack, click-clack. I opened my eyes, saw yellow sunlight in a bar across the litter on the floor. The power truss creaked, pulling at my arm. My broken leg was throbbing its indignation at the treatment it had received\u2014walking brace and all\u2014and the burned arm was yelling aloud for more of that nice dope that had been keeping it from realizing how bad it was. All things considered, I felt like a badly embalmed mummy\u2014except that I was hungry. I had been a fool not to fill my pockets when I left the escape capsule in the shallows off Key Largo, but things had been happening too fast.\n \n I had barely made it to the fishing boat, whose owner I had coerced into rendezvousing with me before shells started dropping around us. If the gunners on the cruiser ten miles away had had any luck, they would have finished me\u2014and the hapless fisherman\u2014right then. We rode out a couple of near misses, before I put the cruiser's gunnery crew off the air.\n \n At a fishing camp on the beach, I found a car\u2014with driver. He dropped me at the railyard, and drove off under the impression he was in town for groceries. He'd never believe he'd seen me.\n \n Now I'd had my sleep. I had to start getting ready for the next act of the farce.\n \n I pressed the release on the power truss, gingerly unclamped it, then rigged a sling from a strip of shirt tail. I tied the arm to my side as inconspicuously as possible. I didn't disturb the bandages.\n \n I needed new clothes\u2014or at least different ones\u2014and something to cover my shaved skull. I couldn't stay hidden forever. The yard cop had recognized me at a glance.\n \n I lay back, waiting for the train to slow for a town. I wasn't unduly worried\u2014at the moment. The watchman probably hadn't convinced anyone he'd actually seen me. Maybe he hadn't been too sure himself.\n \n The click-clack slowed and the train shuddered to a stop. I crept to the door, peered through the crack. There were sunny fields, a few low buildings in the distance, the corner of a platform. I closed my eyes and let my awareness stretch out.\n \n \"\u2014 lousy job. What's the use? Little witch in the lunch room ... up in the hills, squirrel hunting, bottle of whiskey.... \"\n \n I settled into control gently, trying not to alarm the man. I saw through his eyes the dusty box car, the rust on the tracks, the listless weeds growing among cinders, and the weathered boards of the platform. I turned him, and saw the dingy glass of the telegraph window, a sagging screen door with a chipped enameled cola sign.\n \n I walked the man to the door, and through it. Behind a linoleum-topped counter, a coarse-skinned teen-age girl with heavy breasts and wet patches under her arms looked up without interest as the door banged.\n \n My host went on to the counter, gestured toward the waxed-paper-wrapped sandwiches under a glass cover. \"I'll take 'em all. And candy bars, and cigarettes. And give me a big glass of water.\"\n \n \"Better git out there and look after yer train,\" the girl said carelessly. \"When'd you git so all-fired hungry all of a sudden?\"\n \n \"Put it in a bag. Quick.\"\n \n \"Look who's getting bossy\u2014\"\n \n My host rounded the counter, picked up a used paper bag, began stuffing food in it. The girl stared at him, then pushed him back. \"You git back around that counter!\"\n \n She filled the bag, took a pencil from behind her ear.\n \n \"That'll be one eighty-five. Cash.\"\n \n My host took two dog-eared bills from his shirt pocket, dropped them on the counter and waited while the girl filled a glass. He picked it up and started out.\n \n \"Hey! Where you goin' with my glass?\"\n \n The trainman crossed the platform, headed for the boxcar. He slid the loose door back a few inches against the slack latch, pushed the bag inside, placed the glass of water beside it, then pulled off his grimy railroader's cap and pushed it through the opening. He turned. The girl watched from the platform. A rattle passed down the line and the train started up with a lurch. The man walked back toward the girl. I heard him say: \"Friend o' mine in there\u2014just passin' through.\"\n \n I was discovering that it wasn't necessary to hold tight control over every move of a subject. Once given the impulse to act, he would rationalize his behavior, fill in the details\u2014and never know that the original idea hadn't been his own.\n \n I drank the water first, ate a sandwich, then lit a cigarette and lay back. So far so good. The crates in the car were marked \"U. S. Naval Aerospace Station, Bayou Le Cochon\". With any luck I'd reach New Orleans in another twelve hours. The first step of my plan included a raid on the Delta National Labs; but that was tomorrow. That could wait.\n \n \n\n \n It was a little before dawn when I crawled out of the car at a siding in the swampy country a few miles out of New Orleans. I wasn't feeling good, but I had a stake in staying on my feet. I still had a few miles in me. I had my supplies\u2014a few candy bars and some cigarettes\u2014stuffed in the pockets of the tattered issue coverall. Otherwise, I was unencumbered. Unless you wanted to count the walking brace on my right leg and the sling binding my arm.\n \n I picked my way across mushy ground to a pot-holed black-top road, started limping toward a few car lights visible half a mile away. It was already hot. The swamp air was like warmed-over subway fumes. Through the drugs, I could feel my pulse throbbing in my various wounds. I reached out and touched the driver's mind; he was thinking about shrimps, a fish-hook wound on his left thumb and a girl with black hair. \"Want a lift?\" he called.\n \n I thanked him and got in. He gave me a glance and I pinched off his budding twinge of curiosity. It was almost an effort now not to follow his thoughts. It was as though my mind, having learned the trick of communications with others, instinctively reached out toward them.\n \n An hour later he dropped me on a street corner in a shabby marketing district of the city and drove off. I hoped he made out all right with the dark-haired girl. I spotted a used-clothing store and headed for it.\n \n Twenty minutes later I was back on the sidewalk, dressed in a pinkish-gray suit that had been cut a long time ago by a Latin tailor\u2014maybe to settle a grudge. The shirt that went with it was an unsuccessful violet. The black string tie lent a dubious air of distinction. I'd swapped the railroader's cap for a tarnished beret. The man who had supplied the outfit was still asleep. I figured I'd done him a favor by taking it. I couldn't hope to pass for a fisherman\u2014I wasn't the type. Maybe I'd get by as a coffee-house derelict.\n \n I walked past fly-covered fish stalls, racks of faded garments, grimy vegetables in bins, enough paint-flaked wrought iron to cage a herd of brontosauri, and fetched up at a cab stand. I picked a fat driver with a wart.\n \n \"How much to the Delta National Laboratories?\"\n \n He rolled an eye toward me, shifted his toothpick.\n \n \"What ya wanna go out there for? Nothing out there.\"\n \n \"I'm a tourist,\" I said. \"They told me before I left home not to miss it.\"\n \n He grunted, reached back and opened the door. I got in. He flipped his flag down, started up with a clash of gears and pulled out without looking.\n \n \"How far is it?\" I asked him.\n \n \"It ain't far. Mile, mile and a quarter.\"\n \n \"Pretty big place, I guess.\"\n \n He didn't answer.\n \n We went through a warehousing district, swung left along the waterfront, bumped over railroad tracks, and pulled up at a nine-foot cyclone fence with a locked gate.\n \n \"A buck ten,\" my driver said.\n \n I looked out at the fence, a barren field, a distant group of low buildings. \"What's this?\"\n \n \"This is the place you ast for. That'll be a buck ten, mister.\"\n \n I touched his mind, planted a couple of false impressions and withdrew. He blinked, then started up, drove around the field, pulled up at an open gate with a blue-uniformed guard. He looked back at me.\n \n \"You want I should drive in, sir?\"\n \n \"I'll get out here.\"\n \n He jumped out, opened my door, helped me out with a hand under my good elbow. \"I'll get your change, sir,\" he said, reaching for his hip.\n \n \"Keep it.\"\n \n \"Thank YOU.\" He hesitated. \"Maybe I oughta stick around. You know.\"\n \n \"I'll be all right.\"\n \n \"I hope so,\" he said. \"A man like you\u2014you and me\u2014\" he winked. \"After all, we ain't both wearing berets fer nothing.\"\n \n \"True,\" I said. \"Consider your tip doubled. Now drive away into the sunrise and forget you ever saw me.\"\n\nQuestion:\nHow does Granthan learn, and use the Gool's mind control technique to his advantage?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31009, "query_start_index": 31011, "query_end_index": 31105, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Granthan learns how to use the Gool\u2019s mind control technique by watching them and utilizing their own methods. He has previous experience with psychodynamics that helps inform him on how to do so. He notices their patterns and tries to duplicate them. He essentially copies their techniques of probing into tiny planes of existence to reach a black pit where the Gool seem to exist. He does so seemingly successfully and is able to locate and control a Gool\u2019s mind, according to his own analysis. He uses it to learn more about Gool\u2019s and how they live. \n\nGranthan begins to use the mind control technique to allow people to do his bidding for him. He is able to reenter Earth by controlling an officer to grant him entry. He detonates the missiles that are launched to kill him through the same methods. He prevents himself from being attacked or potentially caught while at the train yard by again using mind control. He saves the life of himself and the fisherman helping him by destroying a cruiser\u2019s gunnery crew. He is able to get food for himself by mind-controlling a man to go and buy him goods at a store. He is able to hitch a ride on a truck by influencing the driver. \n"}
{"id": "63041_2", "pid": "63041_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMorgue Ship\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n This was Burnett's last trip. Three more shelves to fill with space-slain warriors\u2014and he would be among the living again.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n \n There was another dead man aboard the Constellation .\n \n Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him; machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet, keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n \n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship. Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor warrior's body out of the void.\n \n He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke, who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a decent burial.\n \n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n \n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five, ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n \n Rice said:\n \n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day drunk!\"\n \n Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships, salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n \n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n \n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved for action.\n \n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n \n \"Sam!\"\n \n Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n \n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n \n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood cooling in it.\n \n \n\n \n Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed without making any noise on the rungs.\n \n He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\n  You never catch up with the war.\n \n \n All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited glory are always a million miles ahead.\n \n He bit his teeth together.\n  You never catch up with the war.\n \n \n You come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your ribs.\n \n You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n \n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n \n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be. After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing your job with mechanical hands.\n \n But even a machine breaks down....\n \n \n\n \n \"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder. Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n \n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it was.\n \n Maybe it was because the body looked a little too dead.\n \n Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way, stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n \n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n \n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n \n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n \n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.\n \n Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That right?\"\n \n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n \n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell. What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone else.\n \n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think! Kriere\u2014The All-Mighty\u2014in our territory. His right hand man dead. That means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"\n \n Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n\"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n \n \"As for Kriere\u2014if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution is taken to protect that one.\"\n \n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n \n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n \n \"We'll radio for help?\"\n \n \"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n \n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n\"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n \n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone\u2014\"\n \n Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes. He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship, hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n \n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here\u2014what's his name? Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n \n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n \n Lethla was alive.\n \n He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream. He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what language it would use if it had to.\n \n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it like a dead cold star.\n \n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight, biting lines into his sharp face.\n \n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n\"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"\n \n A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head. You never catch up with the war!\n \n \n But what if the war catches up with you?\n \n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\n \n \n\n \n Lethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n \n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it, Earthman.\"\n \n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"\n \n Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible at all.\"\n \n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and quick.\n \n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n \n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's your radio?\"\n \n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.\n \n \"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n\"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and coils. The radio.\n \n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by the new bitterness in it.\n \n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n \n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk\u2014\"\n \n Rice said it, slow:\n \n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead men belong here.\"\n \n Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first\u2014we must rescue Kriere....\"\n \n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n \n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama. Lethla's voice came next:\n \n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.\n \n \"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus. We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n \n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe to Venus.\"\n \n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"\n \n \"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n \n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n \n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be picked up\u2014 now! \"\n \n \n\n \n Rice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n \n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n \n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on board the Constellation in half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n \n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n \n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"\n \n Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor. Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n \n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n \n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you never knew who it would be.\n \n He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals. Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a slow pace.\n \n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape? See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out alive; if they cooperated.\n \n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\n  You may never catch up with the war again.\n \n \n The last trip!\n \n Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n \n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms, wet thin lips.\n \n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n \n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n \n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it would all be over.\n \n Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead, he squinted.\n \n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good trick.\"\n \n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Burnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen, eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n \n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last time anybody would ever board the Constellation alive. His stomach went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.\n \n If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that\u2014\n \n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat, water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored because of his gun.\n \n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n \n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n \n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered, fooled\u2014somehow. But\u2014how?\n \n Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew, artery\u2014heart.\n \n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and this would be the last trip.\n \n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n \n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the star-port.\"\n \n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly. Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first, why\u2014\n \n Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the Constellation . Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about to be rescued.\n \n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he was about to end a ten-years' war.\n \n There was only one way of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be fast.\n \n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies from space.\n \n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet, too.\n \n The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its slowness.\n \n It reached Kriere.\n \n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n \n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\n \n \n\n \n Lethla watched.\n \n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the Constellation . I believe it.\"\n \n \n\n \n And the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n \n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n \n Burnett spun about and leaped.\n \n The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n \n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n \n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and started laughing.\n \n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n \n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n \n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"\n \n \"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open. Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n \n \"This is the hard way\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never have to come aboard the Constellation , though, Rice.\" His voice trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago\u2014\"\n \n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of them out:\n \n \"Rice?\"\n \n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n \n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"\n \n \"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n \n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there\u2014number ninety-eight is Lethla\u2014number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back any way\u2014but\u2014the way\u2014we used to\u2014\"\n \n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a million miles.\n \n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n \n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to dissolve.\n \n Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n \n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed, thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n \n And then he said softly:\n \n \" One hundred. \"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what Sam Burnett does for his job.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22641, "query_start_index": 22643, "query_end_index": 22696, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sam Burnett is a coroner on the morgue ship Constellation. His job is to go to space and pick up 100 dead warriors and then return to Earth for them to be given a proper burial. When the ship has filled its capacity it returns specifically to New York. Sam has been working at this job for the past ten years. He uses a machine with metal claws to pick the dead bodies from space and then bring them in through the star-port grind. After the bodies are brought onto the ship, if they are not enemy warriors, the bodies are prepared for return to Earth. The bodies are prepared by Sam in a drainage-preservative lab. "}
{"id": "63041_2", "pid": "63041_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMorgue Ship\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n This was Burnett's last trip. Three more shelves to fill with space-slain warriors\u2014and he would be among the living again.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n \n There was another dead man aboard the Constellation .\n \n Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him; machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet, keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n \n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship. Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor warrior's body out of the void.\n \n He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke, who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a decent burial.\n \n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n \n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five, ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n \n Rice said:\n \n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day drunk!\"\n \n Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships, salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n \n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n \n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved for action.\n \n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n \n \"Sam!\"\n \n Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n \n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n \n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood cooling in it.\n \n \n\n \n Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed without making any noise on the rungs.\n \n He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\n  You never catch up with the war.\n \n \n All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited glory are always a million miles ahead.\n \n He bit his teeth together.\n  You never catch up with the war.\n \n \n You come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your ribs.\n \n You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n \n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n \n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be. After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing your job with mechanical hands.\n \n But even a machine breaks down....\n \n \n\n \n \"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder. Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n \n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it was.\n \n Maybe it was because the body looked a little too dead.\n \n Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way, stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n \n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n \n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n \n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n \n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.\n \n Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That right?\"\n \n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n \n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell. What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone else.\n \n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think! Kriere\u2014The All-Mighty\u2014in our territory. His right hand man dead. That means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"\n \n Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n\"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n \n \"As for Kriere\u2014if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution is taken to protect that one.\"\n \n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n \n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n \n \"We'll radio for help?\"\n \n \"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n \n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n\"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n \n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone\u2014\"\n \n Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes. He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship, hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n \n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here\u2014what's his name? Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n \n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n \n Lethla was alive.\n \n He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream. He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what language it would use if it had to.\n \n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it like a dead cold star.\n \n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight, biting lines into his sharp face.\n \n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n\"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"\n \n A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head. You never catch up with the war!\n \n \n But what if the war catches up with you?\n \n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\n \n \n\n \n Lethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n \n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it, Earthman.\"\n \n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"\n \n Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible at all.\"\n \n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and quick.\n \n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n \n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's your radio?\"\n \n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.\n \n \"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n\"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and coils. The radio.\n \n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by the new bitterness in it.\n \n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n \n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk\u2014\"\n \n Rice said it, slow:\n \n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead men belong here.\"\n \n Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first\u2014we must rescue Kriere....\"\n \n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n \n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama. Lethla's voice came next:\n \n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.\n \n \"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus. We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n \n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe to Venus.\"\n \n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"\n \n \"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n \n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n \n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be picked up\u2014 now! \"\n \n \n\n \n Rice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n \n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n \n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on board the Constellation in half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n \n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n \n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"\n \n Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor. Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n \n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n \n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you never knew who it would be.\n \n He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals. Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a slow pace.\n \n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape? See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out alive; if they cooperated.\n \n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\n  You may never catch up with the war again.\n \n \n The last trip!\n \n Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n \n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms, wet thin lips.\n \n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n \n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n \n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it would all be over.\n \n Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead, he squinted.\n \n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good trick.\"\n \n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Burnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen, eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n \n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last time anybody would ever board the Constellation alive. His stomach went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.\n \n If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that\u2014\n \n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat, water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored because of his gun.\n \n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n \n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n \n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered, fooled\u2014somehow. But\u2014how?\n \n Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew, artery\u2014heart.\n \n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and this would be the last trip.\n \n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n \n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the star-port.\"\n \n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly. Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first, why\u2014\n \n Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the Constellation . Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about to be rescued.\n \n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he was about to end a ten-years' war.\n \n There was only one way of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be fast.\n \n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies from space.\n \n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet, too.\n \n The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its slowness.\n \n It reached Kriere.\n \n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n \n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\n \n \n\n \n Lethla watched.\n \n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the Constellation . I believe it.\"\n \n \n\n \n And the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n \n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n \n Burnett spun about and leaped.\n \n The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n \n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n \n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and started laughing.\n \n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n \n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n \n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"\n \n \"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open. Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n \n \"This is the hard way\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never have to come aboard the Constellation , though, Rice.\" His voice trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago\u2014\"\n \n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of them out:\n \n \"Rice?\"\n \n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n \n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"\n \n \"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n \n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there\u2014number ninety-eight is Lethla\u2014number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back any way\u2014but\u2014the way\u2014we used to\u2014\"\n \n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a million miles.\n \n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n \n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to dissolve.\n \n Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n \n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed, thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n \n And then he said softly:\n \n \" One hundred. \"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what Sam Burnett does for his job.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22641, "query_start_index": 22643, "query_end_index": 22696, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sam Burnett works on a morgue ship, collecting and preparing bodies of spacemen to bring back to Earth for burials. His duties involve driving the ship, opening the star-port to extend the retriever claw, and plucking dead bodies from the void. The morgue ship is always filled with dead men on the way back to Earth and returns empty to find more soldiers. Burnett is also responsible for the drainage-preservative lab, where the bodies are drained and pumped with preservatives for burial. The bodies are then stored on the shelves, where they are lined up and returned to Earth once there is a full cargo. "}
{"id": "63041_2", "pid": "63041_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMorgue Ship\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n This was Burnett's last trip. Three more shelves to fill with space-slain warriors\u2014and he would be among the living again.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n \n There was another dead man aboard the Constellation .\n \n Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him; machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet, keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n \n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship. Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor warrior's body out of the void.\n \n He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke, who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a decent burial.\n \n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n \n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five, ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n \n Rice said:\n \n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day drunk!\"\n \n Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships, salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n \n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n \n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved for action.\n \n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n \n \"Sam!\"\n \n Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n \n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n \n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood cooling in it.\n \n \n\n \n Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed without making any noise on the rungs.\n \n He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\n  You never catch up with the war.\n \n \n All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited glory are always a million miles ahead.\n \n He bit his teeth together.\n  You never catch up with the war.\n \n \n You come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your ribs.\n \n You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n \n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n \n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be. After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing your job with mechanical hands.\n \n But even a machine breaks down....\n \n \n\n \n \"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder. Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n \n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it was.\n \n Maybe it was because the body looked a little too dead.\n \n Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way, stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n \n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n \n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n \n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n \n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.\n \n Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That right?\"\n \n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n \n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell. What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone else.\n \n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think! Kriere\u2014The All-Mighty\u2014in our territory. His right hand man dead. That means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"\n \n Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n\"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n \n \"As for Kriere\u2014if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution is taken to protect that one.\"\n \n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n \n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n \n \"We'll radio for help?\"\n \n \"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n \n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n\"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n \n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone\u2014\"\n \n Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes. He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship, hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n \n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here\u2014what's his name? Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n \n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n \n Lethla was alive.\n \n He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream. He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what language it would use if it had to.\n \n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it like a dead cold star.\n \n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight, biting lines into his sharp face.\n \n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n\"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"\n \n A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head. You never catch up with the war!\n \n \n But what if the war catches up with you?\n \n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\n \n \n\n \n Lethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n \n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it, Earthman.\"\n \n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"\n \n Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible at all.\"\n \n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and quick.\n \n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n \n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's your radio?\"\n \n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.\n \n \"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n\"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and coils. The radio.\n \n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by the new bitterness in it.\n \n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n \n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk\u2014\"\n \n Rice said it, slow:\n \n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead men belong here.\"\n \n Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first\u2014we must rescue Kriere....\"\n \n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n \n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama. Lethla's voice came next:\n \n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.\n \n \"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus. We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n \n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe to Venus.\"\n \n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"\n \n \"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n \n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n \n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be picked up\u2014 now! \"\n \n \n\n \n Rice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n \n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n \n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on board the Constellation in half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n \n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n \n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"\n \n Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor. Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n \n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n \n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you never knew who it would be.\n \n He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals. Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a slow pace.\n \n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape? See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out alive; if they cooperated.\n \n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\n  You may never catch up with the war again.\n \n \n The last trip!\n \n Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n \n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms, wet thin lips.\n \n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n \n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n \n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it would all be over.\n \n Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead, he squinted.\n \n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good trick.\"\n \n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Burnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen, eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n \n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last time anybody would ever board the Constellation alive. His stomach went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.\n \n If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that\u2014\n \n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat, water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored because of his gun.\n \n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n \n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n \n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered, fooled\u2014somehow. But\u2014how?\n \n Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew, artery\u2014heart.\n \n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and this would be the last trip.\n \n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n \n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the star-port.\"\n \n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly. Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first, why\u2014\n \n Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the Constellation . Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about to be rescued.\n \n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he was about to end a ten-years' war.\n \n There was only one way of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be fast.\n \n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies from space.\n \n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet, too.\n \n The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its slowness.\n \n It reached Kriere.\n \n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n \n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\n \n \n\n \n Lethla watched.\n \n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the Constellation . I believe it.\"\n \n \n\n \n And the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n \n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n \n Burnett spun about and leaped.\n \n The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n \n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n \n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and started laughing.\n \n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n \n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n \n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"\n \n \"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open. Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n \n \"This is the hard way\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never have to come aboard the Constellation , though, Rice.\" His voice trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago\u2014\"\n \n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of them out:\n \n \"Rice?\"\n \n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n \n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"\n \n \"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n \n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there\u2014number ninety-eight is Lethla\u2014number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back any way\u2014but\u2014the way\u2014we used to\u2014\"\n \n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a million miles.\n \n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n \n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to dissolve.\n \n Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n \n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed, thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n \n And then he said softly:\n \n \" One hundred. \"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what Sam Burnett does for his job.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22641, "query_start_index": 22643, "query_end_index": 22696, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sam Burnett works on the Constellation, which is a morgue ship designed to collect one hundred space soldiers. Sam Burnett works in the laboratory and is responsible for preparing the bodies after they have died, which consists of any necessary surgeries, pumping out blood, and injecting preservatives. Burnett and his partner, Rice, must meet a certain body count for the Constellation before returning to Earth. The job is a long term one; Burnett is on his tenth year of working on the Constellation."}
{"id": "63041_2", "pid": "63041_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMorgue Ship\n \n\n By RAY BRADBURY\n \n \n This was Burnett's last trip. Three more shelves to fill with space-slain warriors\u2014and he would be among the living again.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n He heard the star-port grind open, and the movement of the metal claws groping into space, and then the star-port closed.\n \n There was another dead man aboard the Constellation .\n \n Sam Burnett shook his long head, trying to think clearly. Pallid and quiet, three bodies lay on the cold transparent tables around him; machines stirred, revolved, hummed. He didn't see them. He didn't see anything but a red haze over his mind. It blotted out the far wall of the laboratory where the shelves went up and down, numbered in scarlet, keeping the bodies of soldiers from all further harm.\n \n Burnett didn't move. He stood there in his rumpled white surgical gown, staring at his fingers gloved in bone-white rubber; feeling all tight and wild inside himself. It went on for days. Moving the ship. Opening the star-port. Extending the retriever claw. Plucking some poor warrior's body out of the void.\n \n He didn't like it any more. Ten years is too long to go back and forth from Earth to nowhere. You came out empty and you went back full-cargoed with a lot of warriors who didn't laugh or talk or smoke, who just lay on their shelves, all one hundred of them, waiting for a decent burial.\n \n \"Number ninety-eight.\" Coming matter of fact and slow, Rice's voice from the ceiling radio hit Burnett.\n \n \"Number ninety-eight,\" Burnett repeated. \"Working on ninety-five, ninety-six and ninety-seven now. Blood-pumps, preservative, slight surgery.\" Off a million miles away his voice was talking. It sounded deep. It didn't belong to him anymore.\n \n Rice said:\n \n \"Boyohbody! Two more pick-ups and back to New York. Me for a ten-day drunk!\"\n \n Burnett peeled the gloves off his huge, red, soft hands, slapped them into a floor incinerator mouth. Back to Earth. Then spin around and shoot right out again in the trail of the war-rockets that blasted one another in galactic fury, to sidle up behind gutted wrecks of ships, salvaging any bodies still intact after the conflict.\n \n Two men. Rice and himself. Sharing a cozy morgue ship with a hundred other men who had forgotten, quite suddenly, however, to talk again.\n \n Ten years of it. Every hour of those ten years eating like maggots inside, working out to the surface of Burnett's face, working under the husk of his starved eyes and starved limbs. Starved for life. Starved for action.\n \n This would be his last trip, or he'd know the reason why!\n \n \"Sam!\"\n \n Burnett jerked. Rice's voice clipped through the drainage-preservative lab, bounded against glassite retorts, echoed from the refrigerator shelves. Burnett stared at the tabled bodies as if they would leap to life, even while preservative was being pumped into their veins.\n \n \"Sam! On the double! Up the rungs!\"\n \n Burnett closed his eyes and said a couple of words, firmly. Nothing was worth running for any more. Another body. There had been one hundred thousand bodies preceding it. Nothing unusual about a body with blood cooling in it.\n \n \n\n \n Shaking his head, he walked unsteadily toward the rungs that gleamed up into the air-lock, control-room sector of the rocket. He climbed without making any noise on the rungs.\n \n He kept thinking the one thing he couldn't forget.\n  You never catch up with the war.\n \n \n All the color is ahead of you. The drive of orange rocket traces across stars, the whamming of steel-nosed bombs into elusive targets, the titanic explosions and breathless pursuits, the flags and the excited glory are always a million miles ahead.\n \n He bit his teeth together.\n  You never catch up with the war.\n \n \n You come along when space has settled back, when the vacuum has stopped trembling from unleashed forces between worlds. You come along in the dark quiet of death to find the wreckage plunging with all the fury of its original acceleration in no particular direction. You can only see it; you don't hear anything in space but your own heart kicking your ribs.\n \n You see bodies, each in its own terrific orbit, given impetus by grinding collisions, tossed from mother ships and dancing head over feet forever and forever with no goal. Bits of flesh in ruptured space suits, mouths open for air that had never been there in a hundred billion centuries. And they kept dancing without music until you extended the retriever-claw and culled them into the air-lock.\n \n That was all the war-glory he got. Nothing but the stunned, shivering silence, the memory of rockets long gone, and the shelves filling up all too quickly with men who had once loved laughing.\n \n You wondered who all the men were; and who the next ones would be. After ten years you made yourself blind to them. You went around doing your job with mechanical hands.\n \n But even a machine breaks down....\n \n \n\n \n \"Sam!\" Rice turned swiftly as Burnett dragged himself up the ladder. Red and warm, Rice's face hovered over the body of a sprawled enemy official. \"Take a look at this!\"\n \n Burnett caught his breath. His eyes narrowed. There was something wrong with the body; his experienced glance knew that. He didn't know what it was.\n \n Maybe it was because the body looked a little too dead.\n \n Burnett didn't say anything, but he climbed the rest of the way, stood quietly in the grey-metal air-lock. The enemy official was as delicately made as a fine white spider. Eyelids, closed, were faintly blue. The hair was thin silken strands of pale gold, waved and pressed close to a veined skull. Where the thin-lipped mouth fell open a cluster of needle-tipped teeth glittered. The fragile body was enclosed completely in milk-pale syntha-silk, a holstered gun at the middle.\n \n Burnett rubbed his jaw. \"Well?\"\n \n Rice exploded. His eyes were hot in his young, sharp-cut face, hot and black. \"Good Lord, Sam, do you know who this is?\"\n \n Burnett scowled uneasily and said no.\n \n \"It's Lethla!\" Rice retorted.\n \n Burnett said, \"Lethla?\" And then: \"Oh, yes! Kriere's majordomo. That right?\"\n \n \"Don't say it calm, Sam. Say it big. Say it big! If Lethla is here in space, then Kriere's not far away from him!\"\n \n Burnett shrugged. More bodies, more people, more war. What the hell. What the hell. He was tired. Talk about bodies and rulers to someone else.\n \n Rice grabbed him by the shoulders. \"Snap out of it, Sam. Think! Kriere\u2014The All-Mighty\u2014in our territory. His right hand man dead. That means Kriere was in an accident, too!\"\n \n Sam opened his thin lips and the words fell out all by themselves.\n\"Look, Rice, you're new at this game. I've been at it ever since the Venus-Earth mess started. It's been see-sawing back and forth since the day you played hookey in the tenth grade, and I've been in the thick of it. When there's nothing left but seared memories, I'll be prowling through the void picking up warriors and taking them back to the good green Earth. Grisly, yes, but it's routine.\n \n \"As for Kriere\u2014if he's anywhere around, he's smart. Every precaution is taken to protect that one.\"\n \n \"But Lethla! His body must mean something!\"\n \n \"And if it does? Have we got guns aboard this morgue-ship? Are we a battle-cuiser to go against him?\"\n \n \"We'll radio for help?\"\n \n \"Yeah? If there's a warship within our radio range, seven hundred thousand miles, we'll get it. Unfortunately, the tide of battle has swept out past Earth in a new war concerning Io. That's out, Rice.\"\n \n Rice stood about three inches below Sam Burnett's six-foot-one. Jaw hard and determined, he stared at Sam, a funny light in his eyes. His fingers twitched all by themselves at his sides. His mouth twisted,\n\"You're one hell of a patriot, Sam Burnett!\"\n \n Burnett reached out with one long finger, tapped it quietly on Rice's barrel-chest. \"Haul a cargo of corpses for three thousand nights and days and see how patriotic you feel. All those fine muscled lads bloated and crushed by space pressures and heat-blasts. Fine lads who start out smiling and get the smile burned off down to the bone\u2014\"\n \n Burnett swallowed and didn't say anything more, but he closed his eyes. He stood there, smelling the death-odor in the hot air of the ship, hearing the chug-chug-chug of the blood pumps down below, and his own heart waiting warm and heavy at the base of his throat.\n \n \"This is my last cargo, Rice. I can't take it any longer. And I don't care much how I go back to earth. This Venusian here\u2014what's his name? Lethla. He's number ninety-eight. Shove me into shelf ninety-nine beside him and get the hell home. That's how I feel!\"\n \n Rice was going to say something, but he didn't have time.\n \n Lethla was alive.\n \n He rose from the floor with slow, easy movements, almost like a dream. He didn't say anything. The heat-blast in his white fingers did all the necessary talking. It didn't say anything either, but Burnett knew what language it would use if it had to.\n \n Burnett swallowed hard. The body had looked funny. Too dead. Now he knew why. Involuntarily, Burnett moved forward. Lethla moved like a pale spider, flicking his fragile arm to cover Burnett, the gun in it like a dead cold star.\n \n Rice sucked in his breath. Burnett forced himself to take it easy. From the corners of his eyes he saw Rice's expression go deep and tight, biting lines into his sharp face.\n \n Rice got it out, finally. \"How'd you do it?\" he demanded, bitterly.\n\"How'd you live in the void? It's impossible!\"\n \n A crazy thought came ramming down and exploded in Burnett's head. You never catch up with the war!\n \n \n But what if the war catches up with you?\n \n What in hell would Lethla be wanting aboard a morgue ship?\n \n \n\n \n Lethla half-crouched in the midst of the smell of death and the chugging of blood-pumps below. In the silence he reached up with quick fingers, tapped a tiny crystal stud upon the back of his head, and the halves of a microscopically thin chrysalis parted transparently off of his face. He shucked it off, trailing air-tendrils that had been inserted, hidden in the uniform, ending in thin globules of oxygen.\n \n He spoke. Triumph warmed his crystal-thin voice. \"That's how I did it, Earthman.\"\n \n \"Glassite!\" said Rice. \"A face-moulded mask of glassite!\"\n \n Lethla nodded. His milk-blue eyes dilated. \"Very marvelously pared to an unbreakable thickness of one-thirtieth of an inch; worn only on the head. You have to look quickly to notice it, and, unfortunately, viewed as you saw it, outside the ship, floating in the void, not discernible at all.\"\n \n Prickles of sweat appeared on Rice's face. He swore at the Venusian and the Venusian laughed like some sort of stringed instrument, high and quick.\n \n Burnett laughed, too. Ironically. \"First time in years a man ever came aboard the Constellation alive. It's a welcome change.\"\n \n Lethla showed his needle-like teeth. \"I thought it might be. Where's your radio?\"\n \n \"Go find it!\" snapped Rice, hotly.\n \n \"I will.\" One hand, blue-veined, on the ladder-rungs, Lethla paused.\n\"I know you're weaponless; Purple Cross regulations. And this air-lock is safe. Don't move.\" Whispering, his naked feet padded white up the ladder. Two long breaths later something crashed; metal and glass and coils. The radio.\n \n Burnett put his shoulder blades against the wall-metal, looking at his feet. When he glanced up, Rice's fresh, animated face was spoiled by the new bitterness in it.\n \n Lethla came down. Like a breath of air on the rungs.\n \n He smiled. \"That's better. Now. We can talk\u2014\"\n \n Rice said it, slow:\n \n \"Interplanetary law declares it straight, Lethla! Get out! Only dead men belong here.\"\n \n Lethla's gun grip tightened. \"More talk of that nature, and only dead men there will be.\" He blinked. \"But first\u2014we must rescue Kriere....\"\n \n \"Kriere!\" Rice acted as if he had been hit in the jaw.\n \n Burnett moved his tongue back and forth on his lips silently, his eyes lidded, listening to the two of them as if they were a radio drama. Lethla's voice came next:\n \n \"Rather unfortunately, yes. He's still alive, heading toward Venus at an orbital velocity of two thousand m.p.h., wearing one of these air-chrysali. Enough air for two more hours. Our flag ship was attacked unexpectedly yesterday near Mars. We were forced to take to the life-boats, scattering, Kriere and I in one, the others sacrificing their lives to cover our escape. We were lucky. We got through the Earth cordon unseen. But luck can't last forever.\n \n \"We saw your morgue ship an hour ago. It's a long, long way to Venus. We were running out of fuel, food, water. Radio was broken. Capture was certain. You were coming our way; we took the chance. We set a small time-bomb to destroy the life-rocket, and cast off, wearing our chrysali-helmets. It was the first time we had ever tried using them to trick anyone. We knew you wouldn't know we were alive until it was too late and we controlled your ship. We knew you picked up all bodies for brief exams, returning alien corpses to space later.\"\n \n Rice's voice was sullen. \"A set-up for you, huh? Traveling under the protection of the Purple Cross you can get your damned All-Mighty safe to Venus.\"\n \n Lethla bowed slightly. \"Who would suspect a Morgue Rocket of providing safe hiding for precious Venusian cargo?\"\n \n \"Precious is the word for you, brother!\" said Rice.\n \n \"Enough!\" Lethla moved his gun several inches.\n \n \"Accelerate toward Venus, mote-detectors wide open. Kriere must be picked up\u2014 now! \"\n \n \n\n \n Rice didn't move. Burnett moved first, feeling alive for the first time in years. \"Sure,\" said Sam, smiling. \"We'll pick him up.\"\n \n \"No tricks,\" said Lethla.\n \n Burnett scowled and smiled together. \"No tricks. You'll have Kriere on board the Constellation in half an hour or I'm no coroner.\"\n \n \"Follow me up the ladder.\"\n \n Lethla danced up, turned, waved his gun. \"Come on.\"\n \n Burnett went up, quick. Almost as if he enjoyed doing Lethla a favor. Rice grumbled and cursed after him.\n \n On the way up, Burnett thought about it. About Lethla poised like a white feather at the top, holding death in his hand. You never knew whose body would come in through the star-port next. Number ninety-eight was Lethla. Number ninety-nine would be Kriere.\n \n There were two shelves numbered and empty. They should be filled. And what more proper than that Kriere and Lethla should fill them? But, he chewed his lip, that would need a bit of doing. And even then the cargo wouldn't be full. Still one more body to get; one hundred. And you never knew who it would be.\n \n He came out of the quick thoughts when he looped his long leg over the hole-rim, stepped up, faced Lethla in a cramped control room that was one glittering swirl of silver levers, audio-plates and visuals. Chronometers, clicking, told of the steady dropping toward the sun at a slow pace.\n \n Burnett set his teeth together, bone against bone. Help Kriere escape? See him safely to Venus, and then be freed? Sounded easy, wouldn't be hard. Venusians weren't blind with malice. Rice and he could come out alive; if they cooperated.\n \n But there were a lot of warriors sleeping on a lot of numbered shelves in the dim corridors of the long years. And their dead lips were stirring to life in Burnett's ears. Not so easily could they be ignored.\n  You may never catch up with the war again.\n \n \n The last trip!\n \n Yes, this could be it. Capture Kriere and end the war. But what ridiculous fantasy was it made him believe he could actually do it?\n \n Two muscles moved on Burnett, one in each long cheek. The sag in his body vanished as he tautened his spine, flexed his lean-sinewed arms, wet thin lips.\n \n \"Now, where do you want this crate?\" he asked Lethla easily.\n \n Lethla exhaled softly. \"Cooperation. I like it. You're wise, Earthman.\"\n \n \"Very,\" said Burnett.\n \n He was thinking about three thousand eternal nights of young bodies being ripped, slaughtered, flung to the vacuum tides. Ten years of hating a job and hoping that some day there would be a last trip and it would all be over.\n \n Burnett laughed through his nose. Controls moved under his fingers like fluid; loved, caressed, tended by his familiar touching. Looking ahead, he squinted.\n \n \"There's your Ruler now, Lethla. Doing somersaults. Looks dead. A good trick.\"\n \n \"Cut power! We don't want to burn him!\"\n \n \n\n \n Burnett cut. Kriere's milky face floated dreamily into a visual-screen, eyes sealed, lips gaping, hands sagging, clutching emptily at the stars.\n \n \"We're about fifty miles from him, catching up.\" Burnett turned to Lethla with an intent scowl. Funny. This was the first and the last time anybody would ever board the Constellation alive. His stomach went flat, tautened with sudden weakening fear.\n \n If Kriere could be captured, that meant the end of the war, the end of shelves stacked with sleeping warriors, the end of this blind searching. Kriere, then, had to be taken aboard. After that\u2014\n \n Kriere, the All-Mighty. At whose behest all space had quivered like a smitten gong for part of a century. Kriere, revolving in his neat, water-blue uniform, emblems shining gold, heat-gun tucked in glossy jet holster. With Kriere aboard, chances of overcoming him would be eliminated. Now: Rice and Burnett against Lethla. Lethla favored because of his gun.\n \n Kriere would make odds impossible.\n \n Something had to be done before Kriere came in.\n \n Lethla had to be yanked off guard. Shocked, bewildered, fooled\u2014somehow. But\u2014how?\n \n Burnett's jaw froze tight. He could feel a spot on his shoulder-blade where Lethla would send a bullet crashing into rib, sinew, artery\u2014heart.\n \n There was a way. And there was a weapon. And the war would be over and this would be the last trip.\n \n Sweat covered his palms in a nervous smear.\n \n \"Steady, Rice,\" he said, matter of factly. With the rockets cut, there was too much silence, and his voice sounded guilty standing up alone in the center of that silence. \"Take controls, Rice. I'll manipulate the star-port.\"\n \n Burnett slipped from the control console. Rice replaced him grimly. Burnett strode to the next console of levers. That spot on his back kept aching like it was sear-branded X. For the place where the bullet sings and rips. And if you turn quick, catching it in the arm first, why\u2014\n \n Kriere loomed bigger, a white spider delicately dancing on a web of stars. His eyes flicked open behind the glassite sheath, and saw the Constellation . Kriere smiled. His hands came up. He knew he was about to be rescued.\n \n Burnett smiled right back at him. What Kriere didn't know was that he was about to end a ten-years' war.\n \n There was only one way of drawing Lethla off guard, and it had to be fast.\n \n Burnett jabbed a purple-topped stud. The star-port clashed open as it had done a thousand times before; but for the first time it was a good sound. And out of the star-port, at Sam Burnett's easily fingered directions, slid the long claw-like mechanism that picked up bodies from space.\n \n Lethla watched, intent and cold and quiet. The gun was cold and quiet, too.\n \n The claw glided toward Kriere without a sound, now, dream-like in its slowness.\n \n It reached Kriere.\n \n Burnett inhaled a deep breath.\n \n The metal claw cuddled Kriere in its shiny palm.\n \n \n\n \n Lethla watched.\n \n He watched while Burnett exhaled, touched another lever and said: \"You know, Lethla, there's an old saying that only dead men come aboard the Constellation . I believe it.\"\n \n \n\n \n And the claw closed as Burnett spoke, closed slowly and certainly, all around Kriere, crushing him into a ridiculous posture of silence. There was blood running on the claw, and the only recognizable part was the head, which was carefully preserved for identification.\n \n That was the only way to draw Lethla off guard.\n \n Burnett spun about and leaped.\n \n The horror on Lethla's face didn't go away as he fired his gun.\n \n Rice came in fighting, too, but not before something like a red-hot ramrod stabbed Sam Burnett, catching him in the ribs, spinning him back like a drunken idiot to fall in a corner.\n \n Fists made blunt flesh noises. Lethla went down, weaponless and screaming. Rice kicked. After awhile Lethla quit screaming, and the room swam around in Burnett's eyes, and he closed them tight and started laughing.\n \n He didn't finish laughing for maybe ten minutes. He heard the retriever claws come inside, and the star-port grind shut.\n \n Out of the red darkness, Rice's voice came and then he could see Rice's young face over him. Burnett groaned.\n \n Rice said, \"Sam, you shouldn't have done it. You shouldn't have, Sam.\"\n \n \"To hell with it.\" Burnett winced, and fought to keep his eyes open. Something wet and sticky covered his chest. \"I said this was my last trip and I meant it. One way or the other, I'd have quit!\"\n \n \"This is the hard way\u2014\"\n \n \"Maybe. I dunno. Kind of nice to think of all those kids who'll never have to come aboard the Constellation , though, Rice.\" His voice trailed off. \"You watch the shelves fill up and you never know who'll be next. Who'd have thought, four days ago\u2014\"\n \n Something happened to his tongue so it felt like hard ice blocking his mouth. He had a lot more words to say, but only time to get a few of them out:\n \n \"Rice?\"\n \n \"Yeah, Sam?\"\n \n \"We haven't got a full cargo, boy.\"\n \n \"Full enough for me, sir.\"\n \n \"But still not full. If we went back to Center Base without filling the shelves, it wouldn't be right. Look there\u2014number ninety-eight is Lethla\u2014number ninety-nine is Kriere. Three thousand days of rolling this rocket, and not once come back without a bunch of the kids who want to sleep easy on the good green earth. Not right to be going back any way\u2014but\u2014the way\u2014we used to\u2014\"\n \n His voice got all full of fog. As thick as the fists of a dozen warriors. Rice was going away from him. Rice was standing still, and Burnett was lying down, not moving, but somehow Rice was going away a million miles.\n \n \"Ain't I one hell of a patriot, Rice?\"\n \n Then everything got dark except Rice's face. And that was starting to dissolve.\n \n Ninety-eight: Lethla. Ninety-nine: Kriere.\n \n He could still see Rice standing over him for a long time, breathing out and in. Down under the tables the blood-pumps pulsed and pulsed, thick and slow. Rice looked down at Burnett and then at the empty shelf at the far end of the room, and then back at Burnett again.\n \n And then he said softly:\n \n \" One hundred. \"\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe what Sam Burnett does for his job.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 22641, "query_start_index": 22643, "query_end_index": 22696, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Sam Burnett is one of the two crew members aboard Constellation. For the last ten years he has been traveling in this morgue ship, picking up dead bodies in between Venus and Earth. He moves the ship, stops it at the sight of bodies, picks them up with the ship's extending claw, puts them on the table and inspects, then stocks them on the shelves to take back to Earth when the space is filled and give them a proper burial. The two planets are at war at the moment, so there are plenty of bodies in the void, coming from the crashed ships. Sam also does surgery and helps the bodies preserve. "}
{"id": "49897_4", "pid": "49897_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Business\n \n \n By JAMES E. GUNN\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he\u2014and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\n \n\n \n The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.\n \n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.\n \n As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n \n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n \n Then all was quiet\u2014outside.\n \n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.\n \n \"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\n \n \n\n \n Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it, Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.\"\n \n Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium\u2014'\"\n \n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n \n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n \n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful.\"\n \n Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.\n \n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n \n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n \n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"\n \n \"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure he did the best he could.\"\n \n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n\"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago.\"\n \n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work to do.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"\n \n \"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth share.\"\n \n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money bought it?\"\n \n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n \n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n \n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n \n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that? Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n \n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"\n \n Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n \n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is to\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted indignantly.\n \n \n\n \n Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.\n \n \"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora\u2014it has fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n \n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n \n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n \n \"What about macro-organisms\u2014\" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n\"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n \n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"\n \n \"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit.\"\n \n \"Quit!\"\n \n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver\u2014it won't budge!\"\n \n \n\n \n The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep? Fweep?\"\n \n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n \n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. \"Get it out!\"\n \n Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a\u2014a blob!\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n \n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n \n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me\u2014well!\" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.\n \n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.\n \n \"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep\u2014I mean sweep.\"\n \n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n \n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\" he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve.\"\n \n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n \n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n \n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!\"\n \n \"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n \n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n \n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"\n \n \"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?\"\n \n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n \n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n \n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.\n \n Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\" he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.\n \n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n \n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit\u2014\"\n \n \"Did you ever work on Niccol\u00f2 Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"\n \n Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries\u2014\"\n \n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n \n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.\n \n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.\n \n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\n \n \n\n \n As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on.\"\n \n The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n \n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n \n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n \n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!\"\n \n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n\"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n \n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n \n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.\n \n Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is as good as anybody's.\"\n \n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver\u2014and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She glared venomously at Grampa.\n \n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n \n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n \n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"\n \n \"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here\u2014involuntary colonists.\"\n \n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n \n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize.\"\n \n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were any good.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.\n \n Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it.\"\n \n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n \n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.\n \n Grampa snorted. \"Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to.\"\n \n \"Then it goes deeper,\" Junior insisted. \"It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?\"\n \n Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. \"Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n \n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\n \n \n\n \n He cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses.\"\n \n The faces were still blank and unillumined.\n \n \"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n \n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me\u2014I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'\"\n \n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n\"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible.\"\n \n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it.\"\n \n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.\n \n \"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it.\"\n \n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded ironically.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call\u2014\"\n \n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"\n \n \"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver\u2014even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want.\"\n \n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n\"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me.\"\n \n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it happened.\"\n \n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n \n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.\n \n \"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n \n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n \n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n \n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n \n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n \n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate its center of gravity.\"\n \n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n \n \"It shifts.\"\n \n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n \n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.\n \n \"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n \n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following me.\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n \n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n \n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out, Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and\u2014\"\n \n \"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.\n \n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n \n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n \n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n \n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n \n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n \n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"\n \n Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n \n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said unbelievingly.\n \n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his\u2014whatever it is he uses for skin\u2014is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead.\"\n \n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"\n \n \"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the thought.\n \n \n\n \n Joyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n \n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him\u2014conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move.\"\n \n \"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n \n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n \n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?\"\n \n \"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet.\"\n \n \"Well?\"\n \n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n \n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n \n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures.\"\n \n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\"\n \n \"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\" Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\n \n \n\n \n Reba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway.\"\n \n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !\"\n \n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!\"\n \n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.\n \n Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n \n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n \n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n \n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.\n \n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n\"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"\n \n \"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed\u2014long enough to keep us from being squashed\u2014and then quit.\"\n \n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n\"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n \n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n \n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n \n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?\"\n \n \"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n \n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n \n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised\u2014\"\n \n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to it, I mean?\"\n \n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n \n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n \n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"\n \n At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n\"Fwiend,\" it said.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n \n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"\n \n \"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.\n \n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n \n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work.\"\n \n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug\u2014\"\n \n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"\n \n \"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n \n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n \n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on.\"\n \n \"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.\n \n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave\u2014if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.\n \n \"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points.\"\n \n \"That may be,\" Junior said stubbornly, \"but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing.\"\n \n \"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep,\" Reba said, her voice soft. \"No, here they come now.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Four, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30210, "query_start_index": 30212, "query_end_index": 30277, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Four is the highly intelligent, eight-year-old youngest member of the Peppergrass family. Although he is the youngest, he is the one who figures out the answers to why Fweepland is so heavy and how Fweep disables the flivver\u2019s gravity polarizer. As a child, he is more impulsive than the adults, for example rushing outside to meet Fweep when the others stay back, but this enables him to solve problems and answer questions faster. On the other hand, his lack of experience prevents him from solving the ultimate problem of how to leave the planet, but his riddles and comment that creating a puzzle means you already know the solution trigger an idea for Grampa that may help solve the family\u2019s dilemma. By befriending Fweep so readily, Four discovers that Fweep is responsible for the planet\u2019s \u201cfake\u201d heaviness and the failure of the flivver\u2019s gravity polarizer. He also studies Fweep and determines his significant characteristics such as his impervious skin, lack of enzymes, and radioactivity. While the adults discuss and bemoan the fact that they cannot leave Fweepland, Four goes out and tries to identify the planet\u2019s center of gravity and therefore discovers that Fweep affects the planet\u2019s gravity and that he is a circular polarizer. At the end of the story, Junior even relies on Four to find out why the computer won\u2019t work. Not only is Four a problem solver and investigator, but he is also logical and selfless. He realizes that Fweep doesn\u2019t want him to leave and is willing to stay behind with Fweep so that the rest of his family can leave. "}
{"id": "49897_4", "pid": "49897_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Business\n \n \n By JAMES E. GUNN\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he\u2014and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\n \n\n \n The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.\n \n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.\n \n As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n \n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n \n Then all was quiet\u2014outside.\n \n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.\n \n \"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\n \n \n\n \n Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it, Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.\"\n \n Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium\u2014'\"\n \n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n \n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n \n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful.\"\n \n Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.\n \n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n \n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n \n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"\n \n \"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure he did the best he could.\"\n \n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n\"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago.\"\n \n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work to do.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"\n \n \"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth share.\"\n \n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money bought it?\"\n \n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n \n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n \n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n \n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that? Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n \n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"\n \n Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n \n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is to\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted indignantly.\n \n \n\n \n Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.\n \n \"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora\u2014it has fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n \n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n \n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n \n \"What about macro-organisms\u2014\" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n\"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n \n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"\n \n \"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit.\"\n \n \"Quit!\"\n \n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver\u2014it won't budge!\"\n \n \n\n \n The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep? Fweep?\"\n \n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n \n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. \"Get it out!\"\n \n Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a\u2014a blob!\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n \n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n \n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me\u2014well!\" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.\n \n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.\n \n \"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep\u2014I mean sweep.\"\n \n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n \n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\" he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve.\"\n \n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n \n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n \n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!\"\n \n \"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n \n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n \n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"\n \n \"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?\"\n \n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n \n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n \n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.\n \n Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\" he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.\n \n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n \n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit\u2014\"\n \n \"Did you ever work on Niccol\u00f2 Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"\n \n Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries\u2014\"\n \n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n \n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.\n \n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.\n \n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\n \n \n\n \n As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on.\"\n \n The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n \n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n \n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n \n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!\"\n \n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n\"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n \n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n \n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.\n \n Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is as good as anybody's.\"\n \n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver\u2014and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She glared venomously at Grampa.\n \n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n \n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n \n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"\n \n \"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here\u2014involuntary colonists.\"\n \n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n \n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize.\"\n \n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were any good.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.\n \n Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it.\"\n \n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n \n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.\n \n Grampa snorted. \"Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to.\"\n \n \"Then it goes deeper,\" Junior insisted. \"It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?\"\n \n Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. \"Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n \n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\n \n \n\n \n He cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses.\"\n \n The faces were still blank and unillumined.\n \n \"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n \n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me\u2014I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'\"\n \n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n\"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible.\"\n \n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it.\"\n \n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.\n \n \"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it.\"\n \n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded ironically.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call\u2014\"\n \n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"\n \n \"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver\u2014even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want.\"\n \n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n\"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me.\"\n \n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it happened.\"\n \n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n \n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.\n \n \"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n \n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n \n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n \n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n \n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n \n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate its center of gravity.\"\n \n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n \n \"It shifts.\"\n \n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n \n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.\n \n \"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n \n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following me.\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n \n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n \n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out, Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and\u2014\"\n \n \"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.\n \n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n \n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n \n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n \n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n \n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n \n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"\n \n Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n \n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said unbelievingly.\n \n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his\u2014whatever it is he uses for skin\u2014is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead.\"\n \n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"\n \n \"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the thought.\n \n \n\n \n Joyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n \n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him\u2014conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move.\"\n \n \"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n \n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n \n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?\"\n \n \"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet.\"\n \n \"Well?\"\n \n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n \n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n \n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures.\"\n \n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\"\n \n \"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\" Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\n \n \n\n \n Reba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway.\"\n \n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !\"\n \n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!\"\n \n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.\n \n Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n \n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n \n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n \n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.\n \n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n\"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"\n \n \"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed\u2014long enough to keep us from being squashed\u2014and then quit.\"\n \n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n\"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n \n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n \n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n \n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?\"\n \n \"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n \n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n \n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised\u2014\"\n \n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to it, I mean?\"\n \n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n \n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n \n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"\n \n At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n\"Fwiend,\" it said.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n \n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"\n \n \"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.\n \n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n \n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work.\"\n \n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug\u2014\"\n \n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"\n \n \"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n \n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n \n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on.\"\n \n \"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.\n \n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave\u2014if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.\n \n \"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points.\"\n \n \"That may be,\" Junior said stubbornly, \"but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing.\"\n \n \"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep,\" Reba said, her voice soft. \"No, here they come now.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Four, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30210, "query_start_index": 30212, "query_end_index": 30277, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Four is the youngest of the Peppergrass family, the son of Junior and Reba. He is eight years old, and due to his unusual upbringing living on a ship with his family, does not have many friends of his own. When the family crash-lands on a planet, he discovers a creature who he calls Fweep and the two instantly become friends. Four seems to understand the creatures when he talks, and can interpret his requests. Four is a curious child, and wants to solve the problem of why the ship can't go anywhere after it crash landed, so he took Fweep on an adventure to find the center of gravity of the planet. It is Four who discovers that Fweep is the center of gravity, and it is the fact that this point shifts that makes the gravity (and thus, the polarization) so unpredictable. It is also Four who aims to learn more about the planet outside of the ship, and not just about the problems on the ship itself, and it is this perspective that drives any progress they made. Besides learning about the moving center of gravity, he learns about the way Fweep picks things up as he rolls over them, and investigates how he converts matter and what his outer shell might be contributing to the distribution of energy. After discovering that Fweep is responsible for the gravity of the planet, things get more complicated. Four is at the center of a moral conundrum at the end of the story: if the family wants to return home, they have to appeal to Fweep, who controls the polarization on the planet. However, Fweep's terms are that Four would have to stay behind, because he does not want his only friend to leave. "}
{"id": "49897_4", "pid": "49897_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Business\n \n \n By JAMES E. GUNN\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he\u2014and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\n \n\n \n The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.\n \n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.\n \n As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n \n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n \n Then all was quiet\u2014outside.\n \n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.\n \n \"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\n \n \n\n \n Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it, Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.\"\n \n Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium\u2014'\"\n \n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n \n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n \n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful.\"\n \n Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.\n \n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n \n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n \n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"\n \n \"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure he did the best he could.\"\n \n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n\"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago.\"\n \n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work to do.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"\n \n \"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth share.\"\n \n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money bought it?\"\n \n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n \n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n \n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n \n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that? Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n \n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"\n \n Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n \n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is to\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted indignantly.\n \n \n\n \n Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.\n \n \"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora\u2014it has fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n \n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n \n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n \n \"What about macro-organisms\u2014\" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n\"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n \n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"\n \n \"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit.\"\n \n \"Quit!\"\n \n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver\u2014it won't budge!\"\n \n \n\n \n The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep? Fweep?\"\n \n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n \n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. \"Get it out!\"\n \n Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a\u2014a blob!\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n \n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n \n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me\u2014well!\" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.\n \n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.\n \n \"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep\u2014I mean sweep.\"\n \n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n \n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\" he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve.\"\n \n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n \n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n \n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!\"\n \n \"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n \n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n \n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"\n \n \"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?\"\n \n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n \n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n \n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.\n \n Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\" he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.\n \n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n \n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit\u2014\"\n \n \"Did you ever work on Niccol\u00f2 Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"\n \n Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries\u2014\"\n \n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n \n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.\n \n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.\n \n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\n \n \n\n \n As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on.\"\n \n The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n \n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n \n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n \n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!\"\n \n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n\"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n \n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n \n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.\n \n Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is as good as anybody's.\"\n \n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver\u2014and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She glared venomously at Grampa.\n \n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n \n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n \n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"\n \n \"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here\u2014involuntary colonists.\"\n \n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n \n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize.\"\n \n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were any good.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.\n \n Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it.\"\n \n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n \n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.\n \n Grampa snorted. \"Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to.\"\n \n \"Then it goes deeper,\" Junior insisted. \"It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?\"\n \n Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. \"Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n \n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\n \n \n\n \n He cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses.\"\n \n The faces were still blank and unillumined.\n \n \"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n \n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me\u2014I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'\"\n \n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n\"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible.\"\n \n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it.\"\n \n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.\n \n \"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it.\"\n \n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded ironically.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call\u2014\"\n \n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"\n \n \"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver\u2014even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want.\"\n \n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n\"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me.\"\n \n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it happened.\"\n \n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n \n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.\n \n \"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n \n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n \n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n \n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n \n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n \n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate its center of gravity.\"\n \n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n \n \"It shifts.\"\n \n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n \n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.\n \n \"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n \n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following me.\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n \n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n \n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out, Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and\u2014\"\n \n \"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.\n \n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n \n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n \n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n \n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n \n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n \n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"\n \n Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n \n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said unbelievingly.\n \n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his\u2014whatever it is he uses for skin\u2014is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead.\"\n \n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"\n \n \"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the thought.\n \n \n\n \n Joyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n \n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him\u2014conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move.\"\n \n \"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n \n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n \n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?\"\n \n \"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet.\"\n \n \"Well?\"\n \n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n \n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n \n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures.\"\n \n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\"\n \n \"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\" Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\n \n \n\n \n Reba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway.\"\n \n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !\"\n \n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!\"\n \n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.\n \n Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n \n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n \n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n \n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.\n \n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n\"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"\n \n \"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed\u2014long enough to keep us from being squashed\u2014and then quit.\"\n \n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n\"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n \n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n \n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n \n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?\"\n \n \"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n \n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n \n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised\u2014\"\n \n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to it, I mean?\"\n \n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n \n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n \n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"\n \n At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n\"Fwiend,\" it said.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n \n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"\n \n \"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.\n \n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n \n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work.\"\n \n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug\u2014\"\n \n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"\n \n \"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n \n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n \n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on.\"\n \n \"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.\n \n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave\u2014if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.\n \n \"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points.\"\n \n \"That may be,\" Junior said stubbornly, \"but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing.\"\n \n \"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep,\" Reba said, her voice soft. \"No, here they come now.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Four, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30210, "query_start_index": 30212, "query_end_index": 30277, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Four is an eight-year-old genius and a member of the Peppergrass family. He is pale, has a thin face, and acts much, much older than he is. His mother is Reba and his father is Junior. His parents are concerned about his lack of friends and socialization. He truly acts like an adult, and it seems as though he never got to have a normal childhood. When his Grampa struggles to figure out his logic puzzle, Four solves it for him in mere moments. He then comes up with another puzzle for his Grampa to solve, and he even offers to build him a pircuit board with a few parts that he has laying around the flivver. Four is very excited to meet his new friend Fweep, and it\u2019s clear that he does not want to immediately come clean about Fweep being the reason the family\u2019s spaceship can\u2019t take off. Since he has had so few friends in his life, the pink blob that follows him around means a lot to him, especially since he actually tells Four that he wants to be his friend. If it were up to Four, the family would probably stay on Fweep's planet and colonize the fertile land. However, several of the family members are completely against this idea, and Reba refuses to leave her son behind so that the spaceship can take off again. They are in this conundrum when the story ends. "}
{"id": "49897_4", "pid": "49897_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Gravity Business\n \n \n By JAMES E. GUNN\n \n Illustrated by ASHMAN\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy January 1956. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n This little alien beggar could dictate his own terms, but how could he\u2014and how could anyone find out what those terms might be?\n \n\n \n The flivver descended vertically toward the green planet circling the old, orange sun.\n \n It was a spaceship, but not the kind men had once dreamed about. The flivver was shaped like a crude bullet, blunt at one end of a fat cylinder and tapering abruptly to a point at the other. It had been slapped together out of sheet metal and insulation board, and it sold, fully equipped, for $15,730. It didn't behave like a spaceship, either.\n \n As it hurtled down, its speed increased with dramatic swiftness. Then, at the last instant before impact, it stopped. Just like that.\n \n A moment later, it thumped a last few inches into the ankle-deep grass and knee-high white flowers of the meadow. It was a shock of a jar that made the sheet-metal walls boom like thunder machines. The flivver rocked unsteadily on its flat stern before it decided to stay upright.\n \n Then all was quiet\u2014outside.\n \n Inside the big, central cabin, Grampa waved his pircuit irately in the air. \"Now look what you made me do! Just when I had the blamed thing practically whipped, too!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n Grampa was a white-haired 90-year-old who could still go a fast round or two with a man (or woman) half his age, but he had a habit of lapsing into tantrum when he got annoyed.\n \n \"Now, Grampa,\" Fred soothed, but his face was concerned. Fred, once called Young Fred, was Grampa's only son. He was sixty and his hair had begun to gray at the temples. \"That landing was pretty rough, Junior.\"\n \n \n\n \n Junior was Fred's only son. Because he was thirty-five and capable of exercising adult judgment and because he had the youngest adult reflexes, he sat in the pilot's chair, the control stick between his knees, his thumb still over the Off-On button on top. \"I know it, Fred,\" he said, frowning. \"This world fooled me. It has a diameter less than that of Mercury and yet a gravitational pull as great as Earth.\"\n \n Grampa started to say something, but an 8-year-old boy looked up from the navigator's table beside the big computer and said, \"Well, gosh, Junior, that's why we picked this planet. We fed all the orbital data into Abacus, and Abacus said that orbital perturbations indicated that the second planet was unusually heavy for its size. Then Fred said,\n'That looks like heavy metals', and you said, 'Maybe uranium\u2014'\"\n \n \"That's enough, Four,\" Junior interrupted. \"Never mind what I said.\"\n \n Those were the Peppergrass men, four generations of them, looking remarkably alike, although some vital element seemed to have dwindled until Four looked pale and thin-faced and wizened.\n \n \"And, Four,\" Reba said automatically, \"don't call your father 'Junior.' It sounds disrespectful.\"\n \n Reba was Four's mother and Junior's wife. On her own, she was a red-haired beauty with the loveliest figure this side of Antares. That Junior had won her was, to Grampa, the most hopeful thing he had ever noticed about the boy.\n \n \"But everybody calls Junior 'Junior,'\" Four complained. \"Besides, Fred is Junior's father and Junior calls him 'Fred.'\"\n \n \"That's different,\" Reba said.\n \n Grampa was still waving his puzzle circuit indignantly. \"See!\" The pircuit was a flat box equipped with pushbuttons and thirteen slender openings in the top. One of the openings was lighted. \"That landing made me push the wrong button and the dad-blasted thing beat me again.\"\n \n \"Stop picking on Junior,\" Joyce said sharply. She was Junior's mother and Fred's wife, still slim and handsome as she approached sixty, but somehow ice water had replaced the warm blood in her veins. \"I'm sure he did the best he could.\"\n \n \"Anybody talks about gravitational pull,\" Grampa said, snorting,\n\"deserves anything anybody could say about him. There's no such thing, Junior. You ought to know by now that gravitation is the effect of the curving of space-time around matter. Einstein proved that two hundred years ago.\"\n \n \"Go back to your games, Grampa,\" Fred said impatiently. \"We've got work to do.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa knitted his bushy, white eyebrows and petulantly pushed the last button on his pircuit. The last light went out. \"You've got work to do, have you? Whose flivver do you think this is, anyhow?\"\n \n \"It belongs to all of us,\" Four said shrilly. \"You gave us all a sixth share.\"\n \n \"That's right, Four,\" Grampa muttered, \"so I did. But whose money bought it?\"\n \n \"You bought it, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"That's right! And who invented the gravity polarizer and the space flivver? Eh? Who made possible this gallivanting all over space?\"\n \n \"You, Grampa,\" Fred said.\n \n \"You bet! And who made one hundred million dollars out of it that the rest of you vultures are just hanging around to gobble up when I die?\"\n \n \"And who spent it all trying to invent perpetual motion machines and longevity pills,\" Joyce said bitterly, \"and fixed it so we'd have to go searching for uranium and habitable worlds all through this deadly galaxy? You, Grampa!\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa protested, \"I got a little put away yet. You'll be sorry when I'm dead and gone.\"\n \n \"You're never going to die, Grampa,\" Joyce said harshly. \"Just before we left, you bought a hundred-year contract with that Life-Begins-At-Ninety longevity company.\"\n \n \"Well, now,\" said Grampa, blinking, \"how'd you find out about that? Well, now!\" In confusion, he turned back to the pircuit and jabbed a button. Thirteen slim lights sprang on. \"I'll get you this time!\"\n \n Four stretched and stood up. He looked curiously into the corner by the computer where Grampa's chair stood. \"You brought that pircuit from Earth, didn't you? What's the game?\"\n \n Grampa looked up, obviously relieved to drop his act of intense concentration. \"I'll tell you, boy. You play against the pircuit, taking turns, and you can put out one, two or three lights. The player who makes the other one turn out the last light is the winner.\"\n \n \"That's simple,\" Four said without hesitation. \"The winning strategy is to\u2014\"\n \n \"Don't be a kibitzer!\" Grampa snapped. \"When I need help, I'll ask for it. No dad-blamed machine is gonna outthink Grampa!\" He snorted indignantly.\n \n \n\n \n Four shrugged his narrow shoulders and wandered to the view screen. Within it was the green horizon, curving noticeably. Four angled the picture in toward the ship, sweeping through green, peaceful woodland and plain and blue lake until he stared down into the meadow at the flivver's stern.\n \n \"Look!\" he said suddenly. \"This planet not only has flora\u2014it has fauna.\" He rushed to the air lock.\n \n \"Four!\" Reba called out warningly.\n \n \"It's all right, Reba,\" Four assured her. \"The air is within one per cent of Earth-normal and the bio-analyzer can find no micro-organisms viable within the Terran spectrum.\"\n \n \"What about macro-organisms\u2014\" Reba began, but the boy was gone already. Reba's face was troubled. \"That boy!\" she said to Junior.\n\"Sometimes I think we've made a terrible mistake with him. He should have friends, play-mates. He's more like a little old man than a boy.\"\n \n But Junior nodded meaningfully at Fred and disappeared into the chart room. Fred followed casually. Then, as the door slid shut behind him, he asked impatiently. \"Well, what's all the mystery?\"\n \n \"No use bothering the others yet,\" Junior said, his face puzzled. \"You see, I didn't let the flivver drop those last few inches. The polarizer quit.\"\n \n \"Quit!\"\n \n \"That's not the worst. I tried to take it up again. The flivver\u2014it won't budge!\"\n \n \n\n \n The thing was a featureless blob, a two-foot sphere of raspberry gelatin, but it was alive. It rocked back and forth in front of Four. It opened a raspberry-color pseudo-mouth and said plaintively, \"Fweep? Fweep?\"\n \n Joyce drew her chair farther back toward the wall, revulsion on her face. \"Four! Get that nasty thing out of here!\"\n \n \n\n \n\n \n \"You mean Fweep?\" Four asked in astonishment.\n \n \"I mean that thing, whatever you call it.\" Joyce fluttered her hand impatiently. \"Get it out!\"\n \n Four's eyes widened farther. \"But Fweep's my friend.\"\n \n \"Nonsense!\" Joyce said sharply. \"Earthmen don't make friends with aliens. And that's nothing but a\u2014a blob!\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" queried the raspberry lips. \"Fweep?\"\n \n \"If it's Four's friend,\" Reba said firmly, \"it can stay. If you don't like to be around it, Grammy, you can always go to your own room.\"\n \n Joyce stood up indignantly. \"Well! And don't call me 'Grammy!' It makes me sound as old as that old goat over there!\" She glared malignantly at Grampa. \"If you'd rather have that blob than me\u2014well!\" She swept grandly out of the central cabin and into one of the private rooms that opened out from it.\n \n \"Fweep?\" asked the blob.\n \n \"Sure,\" Four said. \"Go ahead, fweep\u2014I mean sweep.\"\n \n Swiftly the sphere rolled across the floor. Behind it was left a narrow path of sparkling clean tile.\n \n Grampa glanced warily at Joyce's door to make sure it was completely closed and then cocked a white eyebrow at Reba. \"Good for you, Reba!\" he said admiringly. \"For forty years now, I've wanted to do that. Never had the nerve.\"\n \n \"Why, thanks, Grampa,\" Reba said, surprised.\n \n \"I like you, gal. Never forget it.\"\n \n \"I like you, too, Grampa. If you'd been a few years younger, Junior would have had competition!\"\n \n \"You bet he would!\" Grampa leaned back and cackled. Then he leaned over confidentially toward Reba and whispered, \"Beats me why you ever married a jerk like Junior, anyhow.\"\n \n Reba looked thoughtfully toward the airlock door. \"Maybe I saw something in him nobody else saw, the man he might become. He's been submerged in this family too long; he's still a child to all of you and to himself, too.\" Reba smiled at Grampa brilliantly. \"And maybe I thought he might grow into a man like his grandfather.\"\n \n \n\n \n Grampa turned red and looked quickly toward Four. The boy was staring intently at Fweep. \"What you doing, Four?\"\n \n \"Trying to figure out what Fweep does with the sweepings,\" Four said absently. \"The outer inch or two of his body gets cloudy and then slowly clears. I think I'll try him with a bigger particle.\"\n \n \"That's the idea, Four. You'll be a Peppergrass yet. How about building me a pircuit?\"\n \n \"You get the other one figured out?\"\n \n \"It was easy,\" Grampa said breezily, \"once you understood the principle. The player who moved second could always win if he used the right strategy. Dividing the thirteen lights into three sections of four each\u2014\"\n \n \"That's right,\" Four agreed. \"I can make you a new one by cannibalizing the other pircuit, but I'll need a few extra parts.\"\n \n Grampa pushed the wall beside his chair and a drawer slid out of it.\n \n Inside were row after row of nipple-topped, flat-sided, flexible free-fall bottles and a battered cigar box. \"Thought you'd say that,\" he said, picking out the box. \"Help yourself.\" With the other hand, he lifted out one of the bottles and took a long drag on it. \"Ahhh!\" he sighed, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and carefully put the bottle away.\n \n \"What is that stuff you drink, Grampa?\" Four asked.\n \n \"Tonic, boy. Keeps me young and frisky. Now about that pircuit\u2014\"\n \n \"Did you ever work on Niccol\u00f2 Tartaglia's puzzle about the three lovely brides, the three jealous husbands, the river and the two-passenger rowboat?\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Grampa said. \"Too easy.\"\n \n Four thought a moment. \"There's a modern variation with three missionaries and three cannibals. Same river, same rowboat and only one of the cannibals can row. If the cannibals outnumber the missionaries\u2014\"\n \n \"Sounds good, boy,\" Grampa said eagerly. \"Whip it up for me.\"\n \n \"Okay, Grampa.\" Four looked at Fweep again. The translucent sphere had paused at Grampa's feet.\n \n Grampa reached down to pat it. For an instant, his hand disappeared into Fweep, and then the alien creature rolled away. This time its path seemed crooked.\n \n Its gelatinous form jiggled. \"Hic!\" it said.\n \n \n\n \n As if in response, the flivver vibrated. Grampa looked querulously toward the airlock. \"Flivver shouldn't shake like that. Not with the polarizer turned on.\"\n \n The airlock door swung inward. Through the oval doorway walked Fred, followed closely by Junior. They were sweat-stained and weary, scintillation counters dangling heavily from their belts.\n \n \"Any luck?\" Reba asked brightly.\n \n \"Do we look it?\" Junior grumbled.\n \n \"Where's Joyce?\" asked Fred. \"Might as well get everybody in on this at once. Joyce!\"\n \n The door to his wife's room opened instantly. Behind it, Joyce was regal and slim. The pose was spoiled immediately by her avid question:\n\"Any uranium? Radium? Thorium?\"\n \n \"No,\" Fred said slowly, \"and no other heavy metals, either. There's a few low-grade iron deposits and that's it.\"\n \n \"Then what makes this planet so heavy?\" Reba asked.\n \n Junior shrugged helplessly and collapsed into a chair. \"Your guess is as good as anybody's.\"\n \n \"Then we've wasted another week on a worthless rock,\" Joyce complained. She turned savagely on Fred. \"This was going to make us all filthy rich. We were going to find radioactives and retire to Earth like billionaires. And all we've done is spent a year of our lives in this cramped old flivver\u2014and we don't have many of them to spare!\" She glared venomously at Grampa.\n \n \"We've still got Fweepland,\" Four said solemnly.\n \n \"Fweepland?\" Reba repeated.\n \n \"This planet. It's not big, but it's fertile and it's harmless. As real estate, it's worth almost as much as if it were solid uranium.\"\n \n \"A good thing, too,\" Junior said glumly, \"because this looks like the end of our search. Short of a miracle, we'll spend the rest of our lives right here\u2014involuntary colonists.\"\n \n Joyce spun on him. \"You're joking!\" she screeched.\n \n \"I wish I were,\" Junior said. \"But the polarizer won't work. Either it's broken or there's something about the gravity around here that just won't polarize.\"\n \n \"It's these '23 models,\" Grampa put in disgustedly. \"They never were any good.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned slowly on its axis. The orange sun set and rose again and stared down once more at the meadow where the improbable spaceship rested on its improbable stern. The sixteen Earth hours that the rotation had taken had changed nothing inside the ship, either.\n \n Grampa looked up from his pircuit and said, \"If I were you, Junior, I would take a good look at the TV repairman when we get back to Earth. If we get back to Earth,\" he amended. \"You can't be Four's father. All over the Universe, gravity is the same, and if it's gravity, the polarizer will polarize it.\"\n \n \"That's just supposition,\" Junior said stubbornly. \"The fact is, it isn't because it doesn't. Q.E.D.\"\n \n \"Maybe the polarizer is broken,\" Fred suggested.\n \n Grampa snorted. \"Broken-shmoken. Nothing to break, Young Fred. Just a few coils of copper wire and they're all right. We checked. We know the power plant is working: the lights are on, the air and water recirculation systems are going, the food resynthesizer is okay. And, anyway, the polarizer could work from the storage battery if it had to.\"\n \n \"Then it goes deeper,\" Junior insisted. \"It goes right to the principle of polarization itself. For some reason, it doesn't work here. Why? Before we can discover the answer to that, we'll have to know more about polarization itself. How does it work, Grampa?\"\n \n Grampa gave him a sarcastic grin. \"Now you're curious, eh? Couldn't be bothered with Grampa's invention before. Oh, no! Too busy. Accept without question the blessings that the Good Lord provideth\u2014\"\n \n \"Let's not get up on any pulpits,\" Fred growled. \"Come on, Grampa, what's the theory behind polarization?\"\n \n Grampa looked at the four faces staring at him hopefully and the jeering grin turned to a smile. \"Well,\" he said, \"at last. You know how light is polarized, eh?\" The smile faded. \"No, I guess you don't.\"\n \n \n\n \n He cleared his throat professorially. \"Well, now, in ordinary light the vibrations are perpendicular to the ray in all directions. When light is polarized by passing through crystals or by reflection or refraction at non-metallic surfaces, the paths of the vibrations are still perpendicular to the ray, but they're in straight lines, circles or ellipses.\"\n \n The faces were still blank and unillumined.\n \n \"Gravity is similar to light,\" he pressed on. \"In the absence of matter, gravity is non-polarized. Matter polarizes gravity in a circle around itself. That's how we've always known it until the invention of spaceships and later the polarizer. The polarizer polarizes gravity into a straight line. That makes the ship take off and continue accelerating until the polarizer is shut off or its angle is shifted.\"\n \n The faces looked at him silently. Finally Joyce could endure it no longer. \"That's just nonsense! You all know it. Grampa's no genius. He's just a tinkerer. One day he happened to tinker out the polarizer. He doesn't know how it works any more than I do.\"\n \n \"Now wait a minute!\" Grampa protested. \"That's not fair. Maybe I didn't figure out the theory myself, but I read everything the scientists ever wrote about it. Wanted to know myself what made the blamed thing work. What I told you is what the scientists said, near as I remember. Now me\u2014I'm like Edison. I do it and let everybody else worry over 'why.'\"\n \n \"The only thing you ever did was the polarizer,\" Joyce snapped.\n\"And then you spent everything you got from it on those fool perpetual-motion machines and those crazy longevity schemes when any moron would know they were impossible.\"\n \n Grampa squinted at her sagely. \"That's what they said about the gravity polarizer before I invented it.\"\n \n \"But you don't really know why it works,\" Junior persisted.\n \n \"Well, no,\" Grampa admitted. \"Actually I was just fiddling around with some coils when one of them took off. Went right through the ceiling, dragging a battery behind it. I guess it's still going. Ought to be out near the Horsehead Nebula by now. Luckily, I remembered how I'd wound it.\"\n \n \"Why won't the ship work then, if you know so much?\" Joyce demanded ironically.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said in bafflement, \"it rightly should, you know.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"We're stuck,\" Reba said softly. \"We might as well admit it. All we can do is set the transmitter to send out an automatic distress call\u2014\"\n \n \"Which,\" Joyce interrupted, \"might get picked up in a few centuries.\"\n \n \"And make the best of what we've got,\" Reba went on, unheeding. \"If we look at it the right way, it's quite a lot. A beautiful, fertile world. Earth gravity. The flivver\u2014even if the polarizer won't work, there's the resynthesizer; it will keep us in food and clothes for years. By then, we should have a good-sized community built up, because out here we won't have to stop with one child. We can have all the babies we want.\"\n \n \"You know the law: one child per couple,\" Joyce reminded her frigidly.\n\"You can condemn yourself to exile from civilization if you wish. Not me.\"\n \n Junior frowned at his wife. \"I believe you're actually glad it happened.\"\n \n \"I could think of worse things,\" Reba said.\n \n \"I like your spunk, Reb,\" Grampa muttered.\n \n \"Speaking of children,\" Junior said, \"where's Four?\"\n \n \"Here.\" Four came through the airlock and trudged across the room, carrying a curious contraption made of tripod legs supporting a small box from which dangled a plumb bob. Behind Four, like a round, raspberry shadow, rolled Fweep.\n \n \"Fweep?\" it queried hopefully.\n \n \"Not now,\" said Four.\n \n \"Where've you been?\" Reba asked anxiously. \"What've you been doing?\"\n \n \"I've been all over Fweepland,\" Four said wearily, \"trying to locate its center of gravity.\"\n \n \"Well?\" Fred prompted.\n \n \"It shifts.\"\n \n \"That's impossible,\" said Junior.\n \n \"Not for Fweep,\" Four replied.\n \n \"What do you mean by that?\" Joyce suspiciously asked.\n \n \"It shifted,\" Four explained patiently, \"because Fweep kept following me.\"\n \n \"Fweep?\" Junior repeated stupidly.\n \n \"Fweep?\" Fweep said eagerly.\n \n \"He's why the flivver won't work. What Grampa invented was a linear polarizer. Fweep is a circular polarizer. He's what makes this planet so heavy. He's why we can't leave.\"\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep rotated once on its axis, and Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips. He sighed. \"I got it figured out, Four,\" he said, holding out the pircuit proudly. \"A missionary takes over a non-rowing type cannibal, leaves him there, and then the rowing cannibal takes over the other cannibal and leaves him there and\u2014\"\n \n \"Not now, Grampa,\" Four said inattentively as he watched Fweep making the grand tour of the cabin.\n \n The raspberry sphere swept over a scattering of crumbs, engulfed them, absorbed them. Four looked at Joyce. Joyce was watching Fweep, too.\n \n \"Rat poison?\" Four asked.\n \n Joyce started guiltily. \"How did you know?\"\n \n \"There's no use trying to poison Fweep,\" Four said calmly. \"He's got no enzymes to act on, no nervous system to paralyze. He doesn't even use what he 'eats' on a molecular level at all.\"\n \n \"What level does he use?\" Junior wanted to know.\n \n \"Point the scintillation counter at him.\"\n \n Junior dug one of the counters out of the supply cabinet and aimed the pickup at Fweep. The counter began to hum. As Fweep approached, the hum rose in pitch. As it passed, the hum dropped.\n \n Junior looked at the counter's dial. \"He's radioactive, all right. Not much, but enough. But where does he get the radioactive material?\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary matter,\" Four said. \"He must have used up the few deposits of natural radioactives a long time ago.\"\n \n \"He uses ordinary substances on an atomic level?\" Junior said unbelievingly.\n \n Four nodded. \"And that 'skin' of his\u2014whatever it is he uses for skin\u2014is more efficient in stopping particle emissions than several feet of lead.\"\n \n Fred studied Fweep thoughtfully. \"Maybe we could feed him enough enriched uranium from the pile to put him over the critical mass.\"\n \n \"And blow him up? I don't think it's possible, but even if it were, it might be a trifle more than disastrous for us.\" Four giggled at the thought.\n \n \n\n \n Joyce glared at him furiously. \"Four! Act your age! We've got to do something with him. It's preposterous that we should be detained here at the whim of a mere blob!\"\n \n \"I don't figure it's a whim,\" Grampa said. \"Circular gravity is what he's got to have for one reason or another, so he just naturally bends the space-time continuum around him\u2014conscious or subconscious, I don't know. But protoplasm is always more efficient than machines, so the flivver won't move.\"\n \n \"I don't care why that thing does it,\" Joyce said icily. \"I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it.\"\n \n \"How?\" asked Four. \"Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy.\"\n \n \"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?\"\n \n \"We'd have a long wait,\" Four observed. \"Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet.\"\n \n \"Well?\"\n \n \"Probably he's immortal.\"\n \n \"And he doesn't reproduce?\" Reba asked sympathetically.\n \n \"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures.\"\n \n \"But he must have some way of reproduction,\" Reba argued. \"An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now.\"\n \n \"Maybe he developed,\" Four offered. \"It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed.\" \"He must have been here a long, long time,\" Fred said. \"Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now.\"\n \n \n\n \n Reba looked at Fweep kindly. \"We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway.\"\n \n \"I thank him for nothing,\" Joyce snapped. \"He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go immediately !\"\n \n Fred turned impatiently on his wife. \"Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!\"\n \n Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. \"Fred!\" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room.\n \n Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. \"Well, boy,\" he said to Fred, \"I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you.\"\n \n Fred stood up apologetically. \"I'd better go calm her down,\" he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce.\n \n \"Give her one for me!\" Grampa called.\n \n Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music.\n \n \"Makes you think, doesn't it?\" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly.\n\"Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result.\"\n \n \"What I can't understand,\" Junior said thoughtfully, \"is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed\u2014long enough to keep us from being squashed\u2014and then quit.\"\n \n \"Fweep didn't recognize it immediately, didn't know what it was or where it came from,\" Four explained. \"All he knew was he didn't like linear polarization and he neutralized it as soon as he could. That's when we dropped.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Linear polarization is uncomfortable for him, is it?\" Grampa said.\n\"Makes you wonder how something like Fweep could ever develop.\"\n \n \"He's no more improbable than people,\" said Four.\n \n \"Less than some I've known,\" Grampa conceded.\n \n \"If he can eat anything,\" Reba said, \"why does he keep sweeping the cabin for dust and lint?\"\n \n \"He wants to be helpful,\" Four replied without hesitation, \"and he's lonely. After all,\" he added wistfully, \"he's never had any friends.\"\n \n \"How do you know all these things?\" Joyce asked from her doorway, excitement in her voice. \"Can you talk to it?\"\n \n Behind her, Fred said, \"Now, Joyce, you promised\u2014\"\n \n \"But this is important,\" Joyce cut him off eagerly. \"Can you? Talk to it, I mean?\"\n \n \"Some,\" Four admitted.\n \n \"Have you asked it to let us go?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Well? What did it say?\"\n \n \"He said he didn't want his friend to leave him.\"\n \n At the word, Fweep rolled swiftly across the floor and bounced into Four's lap. It nestled against him lovingly and opened raspberry lips.\n\"Fwiend,\" it said.\n \n \"Well, now,\" Grampa said maliciously, his eye on Joyce, \"that's no problem. We can just leave Four here with Fweep.\"\n \n In a voice filled with sanctimonious concern, Joyce said, \"That's quite a sacrifice to ask, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Joyce!\" Reba cried, horrified. \"Grampa was joking, but you actually mean it. Four is only a baby and yet you'd let him\u2014\"\n \n \"Never mind, Reba,\" Four said evenly. \"It was just what I was going to suggest myself. It's the one really logical solution.\"\n \n \"Fwiend,\" said Fweep gently.\n \n \n\n \n The land of the Fweep turned like a fat old man toasting himself in front of an open fire, and Junior sat at the computer's keyboard swearing in a steady monotone.\n \n \"Junior!\" said Joyce, shocked.\n \n Junior swung around impatiently. \"Sorry, Mother, but this damned thing won't work.\"\n \n \"I'm sure that calling it names won't help, and besides, you shouldn't expect a machine to do something that we can't do. And if it did work, it would only say that the logical answer is the one I sug\u2014\"\n \n \"Mother!\" Junior warned. \"We decided not to talk about it any more. Four is strange enough without encouraging him to think like a martyr. It's out of the question. If that's the only way we can leave this planet, we'll stay here until Four has a beard as white as Grampa's!\"\n \n \"Well!\" Joyce said in a stiff, offended tone and sat back in her chair.\n \n Grampa lowered the nippled bottle from his lips and chortled. \"Junior, I apologize for all the mean things I ever said about you. Maybe you got the makings of a Peppergrass yet.\"\n \n Junior turned back to the keyboard and studied it, his chin in his hand. \"It's just a matter of stating the problem in terms the computer can work on.\"\n \n \"I take it all back,\" said Grampa. \"That computer won't help you with this problem, Junior. This ain't a long, complicated calculation; it's a simple problem in logic. It's a pircuit problem, like the one about the cannibals and the missionaries. We can't leave Fweepland because Fweep won't let our polarizer work. He won't let our polarizer work because he doesn't like gravity that's polarized in a straight line, and he don't want Four to leave him.\n \n \"Now Fweep ain't the brightest creature in the Universe, so he can't understand why we're so gosh-fired eager to leave. And as long as he's got Four, he's happy. Why should he make himself unhappy? As a favor to Four, he'd let us leave\u2014if we'd leave Four here with him, which we ain't gonna do.\n \n \"That's the problem. All we got to do is figure out the answer. No use making a pircuit, because a puzzle circuit is just a miniature computer with the solution built in; if you can build the pircuit, you've already solved the problem. And if you can state the problem to Abacus, you've already got the answer. All you want from it then is decimal points.\"\n \n \"That may be,\" Junior said stubbornly, \"but I still want to know why this computer won't work. It won't even do simple arithmetic! Where's Four? He's the only one who understands this thing.\"\n \n \"He's outside, playing in the meadow with Fweep,\" Reba said, her voice soft. \"No, here they come now.\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Four, and what is his significance in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30210, "query_start_index": 30212, "query_end_index": 30277, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Four is the youngest of the Peppergrass men and perhaps one of the smartest. Despite his young age, he is very intelligent and understanding of the world of rocketships and interplanetary travel. His mother, Reba, worries after him, especially since he doesn\u2019t have any friends to play with or a school to attend. He creates games for his Grampa to solve and puzzle circuits as well. However, when they land on this new planet, he quickly makes a friend in Fweep. After discovering that the planet\u2019s gravity is attached to Fweep and therefore circular, he effectively discovered the true issue at hand. It was not the polarizer that was keeping them trapped, it was Fweep. Four nobly offers to stay behind with Fweep, so the rest can leave and Fweep won\u2019t be lonely. All Fweep wants is a friend, and Four is happy to be that friend. "}
{"id": "61434_1", "pid": "61434_1_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMIGHTIEST QORN\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n Sly, brave and truculent, the Qornt held all humans in contempt\u2014except one!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n I\n \n Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot platinum desk at his assembled staff.\n \n \"Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?\"\n \n There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward, looking solemn.\n \n \"They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. There was no record of where they went.\" He paused for effect.\n \n \"They have now reappeared\u2014occupying the inner planet of this system!\"\n \n \"But, sir,\" Second Secretary Magnan offered. \"That's uninhabited Terrestrial territory....\"\n \n \"Indeed, Mr. Magnan?\" Nitworth smiled icily. \"It appears the Qornt do not share that opinion.\" He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder before him, harrumphed and read aloud:\n \n His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive, Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence, and let Those who dare gird for the contest.\n \n \"Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory,\" Magnan said.\n \n Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger.\n \n \"We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!\"\n \n \"Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out\u2014\" the Military Attache began.\n \n \"There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on the surface,\" the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested frowns to settle into place.\n \n \"Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial controlled soil\u2014and without so much as a flicker from the instruments of the Navigational Monitor Service!\"\n \n The Military Attache blinked. \"That's absurd,\" he said flatly. Nitworth slapped the table.\n \n \"We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is\u2014the Qornt fleets are indetectible!\"\n \n \n\n \n The Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. \"In that case, we can't try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll have my boys start in to crack this thing,\" the Chief of the Confidential Terrestrial Source Section spoke up. \"I'll fit out a couple of volunteers with plastic beaks\u2014\"\n \n \"No cloak and dagger work, gentlemen! Long range policy will be worked out by Deep-Think teams back at the Department. Our role will be a holding action. Now I want suggestions for a comprehensive, well rounded and decisive course for meeting this threat. Any recommendation?\"\n \n The Political Officer placed his fingertips together. \"What about a stiff Note demanding an extra week's time?\"\n \n \"No! No begging,\" the Economic Officer objected. \"I'd say a calm, dignified, aggressive withdrawal\u2014as soon as possible.\"\n \n \"We don't want to give them the idea we spook easily,\" the Military Attache said. \"Let's delay the withdrawal\u2014say, until tomorrow.\"\n \n \"Early tomorrow,\" Magnan said. \"Or maybe later today.\"\n \n \"Well, I see you're of a mind with me,\" Nitworth nodded. \"Our plan of action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have a population of over fifteen million individuals to relocate.\" He eyed the Political Officer. \"I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.\" Nitworth rapped out instructions. Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan eased toward the door.\n \n \"Where are you going, Magnan?\" Nitworth snapped.\n \n \"Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It was a most interesting orientation lecture, Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to let us know how it works out.\"\n \n \"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these Qornt personally.\"\n \n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n \n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n \n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my head and do something rash if I go.\"\n \n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along. No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n \n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.\n \n \"Oh, Retief,\" Nitworth said. Retief turned.\n \n \"Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves\u2014in any direction.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of white beach with the blue sea beyond.\n \n \"A delightful vista,\" Magnan said, mopping at his face. \"A pity we couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right,\" Retief said. \"Why don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can observe.\"\n \n \"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to think of sightseeing.\"\n \n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n \n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're questioning Corps policy!\"\n \n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n \n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n \n \"It's directly down-slope\u2014\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan clutched at his arm.\n \n There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin, green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n \n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of a giant trunk.\n \n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps into the brush.\n \n A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun, darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free, turned\u2014and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.\n \n Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly.\n \n \"Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"You nailed both of them.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter,\" Magnan said.\n\"It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall and faces like that!\"\n \n The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green trousers.\n \n \"It's not broken,\" he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. \"Small thanks to you.\"\n \n Magnan smiled loftily. \"I daresay you'll think twice before interfering with peaceable diplomats in future.\"\n \n \"Diplomats? Surely you jest.\"\n \n \"Never mind us,\" Retief said. \"It's you fellows we'd like to talk about. How many of you are there?\"\n \n \"Only Zubb and myself.\"\n \n \"I mean altogether. How many Qornt?\"\n \n The alien whistled shrilly.\n \n \"Here, no signalling!\" Magnan snapped, looking around.\n \n \"That was merely an expression of amusement.\"\n \n \"You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous straits at the moment. I may fly into another rage, you know.\"\n \n \"Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished\u2014\" a small whistle escaped\u2014\"at being taken for a Qornt.\"\n \n \"Aren't you a Qornt?\"\n \n \"I? Great snail trails, no!\" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped the beaked face. \"Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it happens.\"\n \n \"You certainly look like Qornt.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all\u2014except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course, they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually.\"\n \n \"A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?\"\n \n \"Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt.\"\n \n \"I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock\u2014descended from a common ancestor, perhaps.\"\n \n \"We are all Pud's creatures.\"\n \n \"What are the differences between you, then?\"\n \n \"Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to their level.\"\n \n \"Do you know anything about a Note passed to the Terrestrial Ambassador at Smorbrod?\" Retief asked.\n \n \n\n \n The beak twitched. \"Smorbrod? I know of no place called Smorbrod.\"\n \n \"The outer planet of this system.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes. We call it Guzzum. I had heard that some sort of creatures had established a settlement there, but I confess I pay little note to such matters.\"\n \n \"We're wasting time, Retief,\" Magnan said. \"We must truss these chaps up, hurry back to the boat and make our escape. You heard what they said.\"\n \n \"Are there any Qornt down there at the harbor, where the boats are?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"At Tarroon, you mean? Oh, yes. Planning some adventure.\"\n \n \"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the evacuees!\"\n \n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n \n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n \n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n \n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n \n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in all?\"\n \n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only. There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n \n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum\u2014unilaterally?\"\n \n \"I suppose so; it sounds like them. A truculent group, you know. And interplanetary relations are rather a hobby of theirs.\"\n \n Zubb moaned and stirred. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. He spoke to his companion in a shrill alien clatter of consonants.\n \n \"What did he say?\"\n \n \"Poor Zubb. He blames me for his bruises, since it was my idea to gather you as specimens.\"\n \n \"You should have known better than to tackle that fierce-looking creature,\" Zubb said, pointing his beak at Magnan.\n \n \"How does it happen that you speak Terrestrial?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"Oh, one picks up all sorts of dialects.\"\n \n \"It's quite charming, really,\" Magnan said. \"Such a quaint, archaic accent.\"\n \n \"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of reception would we get?\"\n \n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy mating\u2014such a tedious business\u2014and of course the Qornt are tied up with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice of you.\"\n \n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne\u2014who openly avow their occupied world\u2014would ignore Terrestrials in their midst?\"\n \n \"If at all possible.\"\n \n Retief got to his feet.\n \n \"I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and attract a little attention.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n \"I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way,\" Magnan puffed, trotting at Retief's side. \"These fellows Zubb and Slun\u2014Oh, they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led into a trap?\"\n \n \"We can't.\"\n \n Magnan stopped short. \"Let's go back.\"\n \n \"All right,\" Retief said. \"Of course there may be an ambush\u2014\"\n \n Magnan moved off. \"Let's keep going.\"\n \n The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope.\n \n \"You can find your way easily enough from here,\" he said. \"You'll excuse us, I hope\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense, Slun!\" Zubb pushed forward. \"I'll escort our guests to Qornt Hall.\" He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back.\n \n \"I don't like it, Retief,\" Magnan whispered. \"Those fellows are plotting mischief.\"\n \n \"Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you.\"\n \n \"That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a patient man, but there are occasions\u2014\"\n \n \"Come along, please,\" Zubb called. \"Another ten minutes' walk\u2014\"\n \n \"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n \n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n \n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n \n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n \n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n \n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch, ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.\n \n \"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n \n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n \n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n \n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n \n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n \n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"\n \n \"These few hotheads are permitted to embroil the planet in war?\"\n \n \"Oh, they don't embroil the planet in war. They merely\u2014\"\n \n \"Retief, this is fantastic! I've heard of iron-fisted military cliques before, but this is madness!\"\n \n \"Come softly, now.\" Zubb beckoned, moving toward a bend in the yellow-lit corridor. Retief and Magnan moved forward.\n \n \n\n \n The corridor debouched through a high double door into a vast oval chamber, high-domed, gloomy, paneled in dark wood and hung with tattered banners, scarred halberds, pikes, rusted longswords, crossed spears over patinaed hauberks, pitted radiation armor, corroded power rifles, the immense mummified heads of horned and fanged animals. Great guttering torches in wall brackets and in stands along the length of the long table shed a smoky light that reflected from the mirror polish of the red granite floor, gleamed on polished silver bowls and paper-thin glass, shone jewel-red and gold through dark bottles\u2014and cast long flickering shadows behind the fifteen trolls at the board.\n \n Lesser trolls\u2014beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed\u2014trotted briskly, bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n \n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n\"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n \n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt\u2014the tallest of the feasters\u2014he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n \n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really must hurry along\u2014\"\n \n \"That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from the other Centers as well.\"\n \n \"What kind of vessels? Warships?\"\n \n \"Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?\"\n \n \"I don't suppose,\" Magnan said casually, \"that you'd know the type, tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?\"\n \n \"They're fully automated twenty-thousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts. They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given his ship.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set of toy sailboats!\"\n \n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n \n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n \n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer the matter to committee.\"\n \n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss having a cosy chat.\"\n \n There was a pause.\n \n \"Ah ... Retief,\" Magnan said. \"Zubb has just presented a most compelling argument....\"\n \n \n\n \n Retief turned. Zubb stood gripping an ornately decorated power pistol in one bony hand, a slim needler in the other. Both were pointed at Magnan's chest.\n \n \"I suspected you had hidden qualities, Zubb,\" Retief commented.\n \n \"See here, Zubb! We're diplomats!\" Magnan started.\n \n \"Careful, Mr. Magnan; you may goad him to a frenzy.\"\n \n \"By no means,\" Zubb whistled. \"I much prefer to observe the frenzy of the Qornt when presented with the news that two peaceful Verpp have been assaulted and kidnapped by bullying interlopers. If there's anything that annoys the Qornt, it's Qornt-like behavior in others. Now step along, please.\"\n \n \"Rest assured, this will be reported!\"\n \n \"I doubt it.\"\n \n \"You'll face the wrath of Enlightened Galactic Opinion!\"\n \n \"Oh? How big a navy does Enlightened Galactic Opinion have?\"\n \n \"Stop scaring him, Mr. Magnan. He may get nervous and shoot.\" Retief stepped into the banquet hall, headed for the resplendent figure at the head of the table. A trio of flute-players broke off in mid-bleat, staring. An inverted pyramid of tumblers blinked as Retief swung past, followed by Magnan and the tall Verpp. The shrill chatter at the table faded.\n \n Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his chair\u2014a low, heavily padded stool\u2014and stared unwinking at Retief, moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n \n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n \n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.\n \n \"Not bad,\" Retief said admiringly. \"Maybe we could get up a match between you and Ambassador Sternwheeler. You've got the volume on him, but he's got timbre.\"\n \n \"So,\" Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. \"You come from Guzzum, eh? Or Smorbrod, as I think you call it. What is it you're after? More time? A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?\" He slammed a bony hand against the table. \"The answer is no !\"\n \n Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. \"Chain that one.\" He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. \"This one's bigger; you'd best chain him, too.\"\n \n \"Why, your Excellency\u2014\" Magnan started, stepping forward.\n \n \"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on you.\"\n \n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered\u2014\"\n \n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries! I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\n \n \n\n \n There was a momentary silence from all sides.\n \n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with flame-colored plumes.\n \n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I thought I'd made my point!\"\n \n \"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n \n \"You bet.\"\n \n \"I'm convinced.\"\n \n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's us.\"\n \n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring eyes.\n \n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n \n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration\u2014\"\n \n \"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\" He belched again.\n \n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n \n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms. Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the ends and closed it.\n \n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n \n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.\n \n \"You can do better than that,\" Qorn hooted. \"Now here's a suggestion: we carve them up a little\u2014lop off the external labiae and pinnae, say\u2014and ship them back.\"\n \n \"Good lord! Retief, he's talking about cutting off our ears and sending us home mutilated! What a barbaric proposal!\"\n \n \"It wouldn't be the first time a Terrestrial diplomat got a trimming,\" Retief commented.\n \n \"It should have the effect of stimulating the Terries to put up a reasonable scrap,\" Qorn said judiciously. \"I have a feeling that they're thinking of giving up without a struggle.\"\n \n \"Oh, I doubt that,\" the blue-and-flame Qornt said. \"Why should they?\"\n \n Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\" he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n \n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n \n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n \n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n\"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can assure you, it's useless. We Qornt like to fight.\"\n \n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\" Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver an Ultimatum.\"\n \n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.\n \n \"We plan to use this planet for target practice,\" Retief said. \"A new type hell bomb we've worked out. Have all your people off of it in seventy-two hours, or suffer the consequences.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n \"You have the gall,\" Qorn stormed, \"to stand here in the center of Qornt Hall\u2014uninvited, at that\u2014and in chains\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, these,\" Retief said. He tensed his arms. The soft aluminum links stretched and broke. He shook the light metal free. \"We diplomats like to go along with colorful local customs, but I wouldn't want to mislead you. Now, as to the evacuation of Roolit I\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Zubb screeched, waved the guns. The Qornt were jabbering.\n \n \"I told you they were brutes,\" Zubb shrilled.\n \n Qorn slammed his fist down on the table. \"I don't care what they are!\" he honked. \"Evacuate, hell! I can field eighty-five combat-ready ships!\"\n \n \"And we can englobe every one of them with a thousand Peace Enforcers with a hundred megatons/second firepower each.\"\n \n \"Retief.\" Magnan tugged at his sleeve. \"Don't forget their superdrive.\"\n \n \"That's all right. They don't have one.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"We'll take you on!\" Qorn French-horned. \"We're the Qorn! We glory in battle! We live in fame or go down in\u2014\"\n \n \"Hogwash,\" the flame-and-blue Qorn cut in. \"If it wasn't for you, Qorn, we could sit around and feast and brag and enjoy life without having to prove anything.\"\n \n \"Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here,\" Retief said. \"I think the rest of the boys would listen to reason\u2014\"\n \n \"Over my dead body!\"\n \n \"My idea exactly,\" Retief said. \"You claim you can lick any man in the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan hovered at Retief's side. \"Twelve feet tall,\" he moaned. \"And did you notice the size of those hands?\"\n \n Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings.\n\"I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds here.\"\n \n \"But that phenomenal reach\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me, I'll get a crack at him.\"\n \n Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort.\n \n \"Enough! Let me at the upstart!\"\n \n Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens\u2014both servitors and bejeweled Qornt\u2014formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the combatants.\n \n Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn bent to haul Retief from his leg\u2014and staggered back as a haymaker took him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief leaped clear.\n \n Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leaned, arms windmilling, crashed to the floor. Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching in vain for Retief.\n \n Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him.\n \n \"Need I remind you, sir,\" he said icily, \"that this is an official diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested parties.\"\n \n Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. \"I must ask you to hand me your weapons, Zubb.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" Zubb began.\n \n \"I may lose my temper,\" Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned back to watch the encounter.\n \n Retief had thrown a turn of violet silk around Qorn's left wrist, bound it to the alien's neck. Another wisp of stuff floated from Qorn's shoulder. Retief, still holding Qorn in an awkward sprawl, wrapped it around one outflung leg, trussed ankle and thigh together. Qorn flopped, hooting. At each movement, the constricting loop around his neck, jerked his head back, the green crest tossing wildly.\n \n \"If I were you, I'd relax,\" Retief said, rising and releasing his grip. Qorn got a leg under him; Retief kicked it. Qorn's chin hit the floor with a hollow clack. He wilted, an ungainly tangle of over-long limbs and gay silks.\n \n Retief turned to the watching crowd. \"Next?\" he called.\n \n The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. \"Maybe this would be a good time to elect a new leader,\" he said. \"Now, my qualifications\u2014\"\n \n \"Sit down,\" Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table, seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. \"A couple of you finish trussing Qorn up for me.\"\n \n \"But we must select a leader!\"\n \n \"That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"As I see it,\" Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine glass, \"you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like to fight.\"\n \n \"We don't mind a little fighting\u2014within reason. And, of course, as Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush things?\"\n \n \"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n \n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one among us who's a slave to instinct\u2014and, naturally, we have to follow him.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n \n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest community singing\u2014\"\n \n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would happen?\"\n \n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n \n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with the new Qornt stepping on our heels\u2014\"\n \n \"I've lost the thread,\" Magnan said. \"Who are the new Qornt?\"\n \n \"After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course. The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize into Verpp\u2014\"\n \n \"You mean Slun and Zubb\u2014the mild-natured naturalists\u2014will become warmongers like Qorn?\"\n \n \"Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old saying goes.\"\n \n \"What do Qornt turn into?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood.\"\n \n \"Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?\" Magnan asked. \"What about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?\"\n \n \"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you Terrestrials over on Guzzum\u2014that was a mad notion. We had no idea what your strength was.\"\n \n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've had diplomatic relations and all\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n \n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"\n \n \"Only a dead Qornt stays home when Attack day comes. And even if he orders us all to cut our own throats, there are still the other Centers\u2014all with their own leaders. No, gentlemen, the Invasion is definitely on.\"\n \n \"Why don't you go invade somebody else?\" Magnan suggested. \"I could name some very attractive prospects\u2014outside my sector, of course.\"\n \n \"Hold everything,\" Retief said. \"I think we've got the basis of a deal here....\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31555, "query_start_index": 31557, "query_end_index": 31597, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ambassador Nitworth, the local head of the government for the Terrestrials, has received an ultimatum from a species called the Qornt. The Qornt want to take over the planet that the Terrestrials currently occupy. This is surprising because the whereabouts of the Qornt have been unknown for the past two centuries. The Ambassador orders Second Secretary Magnan to travel to Roolit I, the planet where the Qornt are now, to investigate the situation in person. Retief is sent to go with Magnan, with orders from the Ambassador to avoid Magnan from doing anything impulsive. When they arrive, Retief wants to investigate the situation on the surface, whereas Magnan would have been happy to take one look and return to his office. As Retief is insisting on taking a look, the two men are spotted by two eight-foot-tall creatures and a skirmish starts. After Retief pulls Magnan from the fight, and some bickering takes place, the men learn that these two creatures are Verpp, not Qornt. They ask if they know about the Ultimatum sent to the Ambassador\u2014the men call the outer planet Smorbrod, but those on Roolit I call it Guzzum. Zubb and Slun (the Verpp) say that they aren\u2019t caught up on political matters, so they don\u2019t have anything to say about the upcoming invasion, but they do give the men information about where they are. Tarroon is the town they are closest to, where there are 15-20 Qornt, and Zubb and Slun say that the Qornt would mostly ignore Terrestrials, which makes Retief think they should walk right in. Magnan is afraid of a trap, but they head into the underground Qornt village. Once they make it to Qornt Hall, the group walks through a tunnel into a huge room with high ceilings, where the walls are plastered with weapons and other spoils of battle. It was a trap: the Verpp walk the men into the dining hall where the Qornt are having a feast, hoping that the Qornt would be mad at the men for interfering with the Verpp. It turns out the Qornt are even larger than the Verpp (twelve feet tall), and Qorn (the lead Qornt) is insistent that there will be no peace, because he is hungry for battle, so he ties up the men. Retief threatens them saying the Terrestrials intended to use Roolit I to test a bomb, and breaks out of his chains in the chaos\u2014the differences in gravity between the planets means that the men are very strong, even if they are much smaller than the Verpp and Qornt. Retief ties up Qorn and declares himself the new leader. The Qornt explain that Verpp molt into Qornt after a few other stages of metamorphosis, and that the Qornt are very driven by a need for battle. Upon return to the outer planet, we learn that Retief has supposedly recruited the Qornt for the Peace Enforcement Corps, and sends them out to battle, circumventing Nitworth\u2019s authority. \n"}
{"id": "61434_1", "pid": "61434_1_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMIGHTIEST QORN\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n Sly, brave and truculent, the Qornt held all humans in contempt\u2014except one!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n I\n \n Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot platinum desk at his assembled staff.\n \n \"Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?\"\n \n There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward, looking solemn.\n \n \"They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. There was no record of where they went.\" He paused for effect.\n \n \"They have now reappeared\u2014occupying the inner planet of this system!\"\n \n \"But, sir,\" Second Secretary Magnan offered. \"That's uninhabited Terrestrial territory....\"\n \n \"Indeed, Mr. Magnan?\" Nitworth smiled icily. \"It appears the Qornt do not share that opinion.\" He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder before him, harrumphed and read aloud:\n \n His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive, Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence, and let Those who dare gird for the contest.\n \n \"Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory,\" Magnan said.\n \n Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger.\n \n \"We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!\"\n \n \"Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out\u2014\" the Military Attache began.\n \n \"There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on the surface,\" the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested frowns to settle into place.\n \n \"Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial controlled soil\u2014and without so much as a flicker from the instruments of the Navigational Monitor Service!\"\n \n The Military Attache blinked. \"That's absurd,\" he said flatly. Nitworth slapped the table.\n \n \"We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is\u2014the Qornt fleets are indetectible!\"\n \n \n\n \n The Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. \"In that case, we can't try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll have my boys start in to crack this thing,\" the Chief of the Confidential Terrestrial Source Section spoke up. \"I'll fit out a couple of volunteers with plastic beaks\u2014\"\n \n \"No cloak and dagger work, gentlemen! Long range policy will be worked out by Deep-Think teams back at the Department. Our role will be a holding action. Now I want suggestions for a comprehensive, well rounded and decisive course for meeting this threat. Any recommendation?\"\n \n The Political Officer placed his fingertips together. \"What about a stiff Note demanding an extra week's time?\"\n \n \"No! No begging,\" the Economic Officer objected. \"I'd say a calm, dignified, aggressive withdrawal\u2014as soon as possible.\"\n \n \"We don't want to give them the idea we spook easily,\" the Military Attache said. \"Let's delay the withdrawal\u2014say, until tomorrow.\"\n \n \"Early tomorrow,\" Magnan said. \"Or maybe later today.\"\n \n \"Well, I see you're of a mind with me,\" Nitworth nodded. \"Our plan of action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have a population of over fifteen million individuals to relocate.\" He eyed the Political Officer. \"I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.\" Nitworth rapped out instructions. Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan eased toward the door.\n \n \"Where are you going, Magnan?\" Nitworth snapped.\n \n \"Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It was a most interesting orientation lecture, Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to let us know how it works out.\"\n \n \"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these Qornt personally.\"\n \n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n \n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n \n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my head and do something rash if I go.\"\n \n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along. No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n \n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.\n \n \"Oh, Retief,\" Nitworth said. Retief turned.\n \n \"Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves\u2014in any direction.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of white beach with the blue sea beyond.\n \n \"A delightful vista,\" Magnan said, mopping at his face. \"A pity we couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right,\" Retief said. \"Why don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can observe.\"\n \n \"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to think of sightseeing.\"\n \n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n \n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're questioning Corps policy!\"\n \n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n \n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n \n \"It's directly down-slope\u2014\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan clutched at his arm.\n \n There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin, green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n \n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of a giant trunk.\n \n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps into the brush.\n \n A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun, darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free, turned\u2014and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.\n \n Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly.\n \n \"Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"You nailed both of them.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter,\" Magnan said.\n\"It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall and faces like that!\"\n \n The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green trousers.\n \n \"It's not broken,\" he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. \"Small thanks to you.\"\n \n Magnan smiled loftily. \"I daresay you'll think twice before interfering with peaceable diplomats in future.\"\n \n \"Diplomats? Surely you jest.\"\n \n \"Never mind us,\" Retief said. \"It's you fellows we'd like to talk about. How many of you are there?\"\n \n \"Only Zubb and myself.\"\n \n \"I mean altogether. How many Qornt?\"\n \n The alien whistled shrilly.\n \n \"Here, no signalling!\" Magnan snapped, looking around.\n \n \"That was merely an expression of amusement.\"\n \n \"You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous straits at the moment. I may fly into another rage, you know.\"\n \n \"Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished\u2014\" a small whistle escaped\u2014\"at being taken for a Qornt.\"\n \n \"Aren't you a Qornt?\"\n \n \"I? Great snail trails, no!\" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped the beaked face. \"Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it happens.\"\n \n \"You certainly look like Qornt.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all\u2014except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course, they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually.\"\n \n \"A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?\"\n \n \"Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt.\"\n \n \"I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock\u2014descended from a common ancestor, perhaps.\"\n \n \"We are all Pud's creatures.\"\n \n \"What are the differences between you, then?\"\n \n \"Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to their level.\"\n \n \"Do you know anything about a Note passed to the Terrestrial Ambassador at Smorbrod?\" Retief asked.\n \n \n\n \n The beak twitched. \"Smorbrod? I know of no place called Smorbrod.\"\n \n \"The outer planet of this system.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes. We call it Guzzum. I had heard that some sort of creatures had established a settlement there, but I confess I pay little note to such matters.\"\n \n \"We're wasting time, Retief,\" Magnan said. \"We must truss these chaps up, hurry back to the boat and make our escape. You heard what they said.\"\n \n \"Are there any Qornt down there at the harbor, where the boats are?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"At Tarroon, you mean? Oh, yes. Planning some adventure.\"\n \n \"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the evacuees!\"\n \n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n \n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n \n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n \n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n \n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in all?\"\n \n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only. There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n \n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum\u2014unilaterally?\"\n \n \"I suppose so; it sounds like them. A truculent group, you know. And interplanetary relations are rather a hobby of theirs.\"\n \n Zubb moaned and stirred. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. He spoke to his companion in a shrill alien clatter of consonants.\n \n \"What did he say?\"\n \n \"Poor Zubb. He blames me for his bruises, since it was my idea to gather you as specimens.\"\n \n \"You should have known better than to tackle that fierce-looking creature,\" Zubb said, pointing his beak at Magnan.\n \n \"How does it happen that you speak Terrestrial?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"Oh, one picks up all sorts of dialects.\"\n \n \"It's quite charming, really,\" Magnan said. \"Such a quaint, archaic accent.\"\n \n \"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of reception would we get?\"\n \n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy mating\u2014such a tedious business\u2014and of course the Qornt are tied up with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice of you.\"\n \n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne\u2014who openly avow their occupied world\u2014would ignore Terrestrials in their midst?\"\n \n \"If at all possible.\"\n \n Retief got to his feet.\n \n \"I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and attract a little attention.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n \"I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way,\" Magnan puffed, trotting at Retief's side. \"These fellows Zubb and Slun\u2014Oh, they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led into a trap?\"\n \n \"We can't.\"\n \n Magnan stopped short. \"Let's go back.\"\n \n \"All right,\" Retief said. \"Of course there may be an ambush\u2014\"\n \n Magnan moved off. \"Let's keep going.\"\n \n The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope.\n \n \"You can find your way easily enough from here,\" he said. \"You'll excuse us, I hope\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense, Slun!\" Zubb pushed forward. \"I'll escort our guests to Qornt Hall.\" He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back.\n \n \"I don't like it, Retief,\" Magnan whispered. \"Those fellows are plotting mischief.\"\n \n \"Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you.\"\n \n \"That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a patient man, but there are occasions\u2014\"\n \n \"Come along, please,\" Zubb called. \"Another ten minutes' walk\u2014\"\n \n \"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n \n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n \n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n \n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n \n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n \n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch, ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.\n \n \"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n \n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n \n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n \n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n \n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n \n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"\n \n \"These few hotheads are permitted to embroil the planet in war?\"\n \n \"Oh, they don't embroil the planet in war. They merely\u2014\"\n \n \"Retief, this is fantastic! I've heard of iron-fisted military cliques before, but this is madness!\"\n \n \"Come softly, now.\" Zubb beckoned, moving toward a bend in the yellow-lit corridor. Retief and Magnan moved forward.\n \n \n\n \n The corridor debouched through a high double door into a vast oval chamber, high-domed, gloomy, paneled in dark wood and hung with tattered banners, scarred halberds, pikes, rusted longswords, crossed spears over patinaed hauberks, pitted radiation armor, corroded power rifles, the immense mummified heads of horned and fanged animals. Great guttering torches in wall brackets and in stands along the length of the long table shed a smoky light that reflected from the mirror polish of the red granite floor, gleamed on polished silver bowls and paper-thin glass, shone jewel-red and gold through dark bottles\u2014and cast long flickering shadows behind the fifteen trolls at the board.\n \n Lesser trolls\u2014beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed\u2014trotted briskly, bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n \n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n\"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n \n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt\u2014the tallest of the feasters\u2014he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n \n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really must hurry along\u2014\"\n \n \"That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from the other Centers as well.\"\n \n \"What kind of vessels? Warships?\"\n \n \"Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?\"\n \n \"I don't suppose,\" Magnan said casually, \"that you'd know the type, tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?\"\n \n \"They're fully automated twenty-thousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts. They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given his ship.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set of toy sailboats!\"\n \n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n \n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n \n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer the matter to committee.\"\n \n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss having a cosy chat.\"\n \n There was a pause.\n \n \"Ah ... Retief,\" Magnan said. \"Zubb has just presented a most compelling argument....\"\n \n \n\n \n Retief turned. Zubb stood gripping an ornately decorated power pistol in one bony hand, a slim needler in the other. Both were pointed at Magnan's chest.\n \n \"I suspected you had hidden qualities, Zubb,\" Retief commented.\n \n \"See here, Zubb! We're diplomats!\" Magnan started.\n \n \"Careful, Mr. Magnan; you may goad him to a frenzy.\"\n \n \"By no means,\" Zubb whistled. \"I much prefer to observe the frenzy of the Qornt when presented with the news that two peaceful Verpp have been assaulted and kidnapped by bullying interlopers. If there's anything that annoys the Qornt, it's Qornt-like behavior in others. Now step along, please.\"\n \n \"Rest assured, this will be reported!\"\n \n \"I doubt it.\"\n \n \"You'll face the wrath of Enlightened Galactic Opinion!\"\n \n \"Oh? How big a navy does Enlightened Galactic Opinion have?\"\n \n \"Stop scaring him, Mr. Magnan. He may get nervous and shoot.\" Retief stepped into the banquet hall, headed for the resplendent figure at the head of the table. A trio of flute-players broke off in mid-bleat, staring. An inverted pyramid of tumblers blinked as Retief swung past, followed by Magnan and the tall Verpp. The shrill chatter at the table faded.\n \n Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his chair\u2014a low, heavily padded stool\u2014and stared unwinking at Retief, moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n \n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n \n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.\n \n \"Not bad,\" Retief said admiringly. \"Maybe we could get up a match between you and Ambassador Sternwheeler. You've got the volume on him, but he's got timbre.\"\n \n \"So,\" Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. \"You come from Guzzum, eh? Or Smorbrod, as I think you call it. What is it you're after? More time? A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?\" He slammed a bony hand against the table. \"The answer is no !\"\n \n Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. \"Chain that one.\" He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. \"This one's bigger; you'd best chain him, too.\"\n \n \"Why, your Excellency\u2014\" Magnan started, stepping forward.\n \n \"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on you.\"\n \n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered\u2014\"\n \n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries! I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\n \n \n\n \n There was a momentary silence from all sides.\n \n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with flame-colored plumes.\n \n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I thought I'd made my point!\"\n \n \"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n \n \"You bet.\"\n \n \"I'm convinced.\"\n \n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's us.\"\n \n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring eyes.\n \n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n \n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration\u2014\"\n \n \"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\" He belched again.\n \n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n \n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms. Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the ends and closed it.\n \n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n \n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.\n \n \"You can do better than that,\" Qorn hooted. \"Now here's a suggestion: we carve them up a little\u2014lop off the external labiae and pinnae, say\u2014and ship them back.\"\n \n \"Good lord! Retief, he's talking about cutting off our ears and sending us home mutilated! What a barbaric proposal!\"\n \n \"It wouldn't be the first time a Terrestrial diplomat got a trimming,\" Retief commented.\n \n \"It should have the effect of stimulating the Terries to put up a reasonable scrap,\" Qorn said judiciously. \"I have a feeling that they're thinking of giving up without a struggle.\"\n \n \"Oh, I doubt that,\" the blue-and-flame Qornt said. \"Why should they?\"\n \n Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\" he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n \n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n \n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n \n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n\"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can assure you, it's useless. We Qornt like to fight.\"\n \n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\" Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver an Ultimatum.\"\n \n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.\n \n \"We plan to use this planet for target practice,\" Retief said. \"A new type hell bomb we've worked out. Have all your people off of it in seventy-two hours, or suffer the consequences.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n \"You have the gall,\" Qorn stormed, \"to stand here in the center of Qornt Hall\u2014uninvited, at that\u2014and in chains\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, these,\" Retief said. He tensed his arms. The soft aluminum links stretched and broke. He shook the light metal free. \"We diplomats like to go along with colorful local customs, but I wouldn't want to mislead you. Now, as to the evacuation of Roolit I\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Zubb screeched, waved the guns. The Qornt were jabbering.\n \n \"I told you they were brutes,\" Zubb shrilled.\n \n Qorn slammed his fist down on the table. \"I don't care what they are!\" he honked. \"Evacuate, hell! I can field eighty-five combat-ready ships!\"\n \n \"And we can englobe every one of them with a thousand Peace Enforcers with a hundred megatons/second firepower each.\"\n \n \"Retief.\" Magnan tugged at his sleeve. \"Don't forget their superdrive.\"\n \n \"That's all right. They don't have one.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"We'll take you on!\" Qorn French-horned. \"We're the Qorn! We glory in battle! We live in fame or go down in\u2014\"\n \n \"Hogwash,\" the flame-and-blue Qorn cut in. \"If it wasn't for you, Qorn, we could sit around and feast and brag and enjoy life without having to prove anything.\"\n \n \"Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here,\" Retief said. \"I think the rest of the boys would listen to reason\u2014\"\n \n \"Over my dead body!\"\n \n \"My idea exactly,\" Retief said. \"You claim you can lick any man in the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan hovered at Retief's side. \"Twelve feet tall,\" he moaned. \"And did you notice the size of those hands?\"\n \n Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings.\n\"I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds here.\"\n \n \"But that phenomenal reach\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me, I'll get a crack at him.\"\n \n Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort.\n \n \"Enough! Let me at the upstart!\"\n \n Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens\u2014both servitors and bejeweled Qornt\u2014formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the combatants.\n \n Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn bent to haul Retief from his leg\u2014and staggered back as a haymaker took him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief leaped clear.\n \n Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leaned, arms windmilling, crashed to the floor. Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching in vain for Retief.\n \n Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him.\n \n \"Need I remind you, sir,\" he said icily, \"that this is an official diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested parties.\"\n \n Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. \"I must ask you to hand me your weapons, Zubb.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" Zubb began.\n \n \"I may lose my temper,\" Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned back to watch the encounter.\n \n Retief had thrown a turn of violet silk around Qorn's left wrist, bound it to the alien's neck. Another wisp of stuff floated from Qorn's shoulder. Retief, still holding Qorn in an awkward sprawl, wrapped it around one outflung leg, trussed ankle and thigh together. Qorn flopped, hooting. At each movement, the constricting loop around his neck, jerked his head back, the green crest tossing wildly.\n \n \"If I were you, I'd relax,\" Retief said, rising and releasing his grip. Qorn got a leg under him; Retief kicked it. Qorn's chin hit the floor with a hollow clack. He wilted, an ungainly tangle of over-long limbs and gay silks.\n \n Retief turned to the watching crowd. \"Next?\" he called.\n \n The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. \"Maybe this would be a good time to elect a new leader,\" he said. \"Now, my qualifications\u2014\"\n \n \"Sit down,\" Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table, seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. \"A couple of you finish trussing Qorn up for me.\"\n \n \"But we must select a leader!\"\n \n \"That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"As I see it,\" Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine glass, \"you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like to fight.\"\n \n \"We don't mind a little fighting\u2014within reason. And, of course, as Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush things?\"\n \n \"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n \n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one among us who's a slave to instinct\u2014and, naturally, we have to follow him.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n \n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest community singing\u2014\"\n \n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would happen?\"\n \n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n \n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with the new Qornt stepping on our heels\u2014\"\n \n \"I've lost the thread,\" Magnan said. \"Who are the new Qornt?\"\n \n \"After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course. The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize into Verpp\u2014\"\n \n \"You mean Slun and Zubb\u2014the mild-natured naturalists\u2014will become warmongers like Qorn?\"\n \n \"Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old saying goes.\"\n \n \"What do Qornt turn into?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood.\"\n \n \"Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?\" Magnan asked. \"What about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?\"\n \n \"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you Terrestrials over on Guzzum\u2014that was a mad notion. We had no idea what your strength was.\"\n \n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've had diplomatic relations and all\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n \n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"\n \n \"Only a dead Qornt stays home when Attack day comes. And even if he orders us all to cut our own throats, there are still the other Centers\u2014all with their own leaders. No, gentlemen, the Invasion is definitely on.\"\n \n \"Why don't you go invade somebody else?\" Magnan suggested. \"I could name some very attractive prospects\u2014outside my sector, of course.\"\n \n \"Hold everything,\" Retief said. \"I think we've got the basis of a deal here....\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31555, "query_start_index": 31557, "query_end_index": 31597, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\tAmbassador Nitworth of the Terrestrials receives an undetectable message from the Qornt. This communication states that they will soon invade the CDT and pillage the surrounding area in 30 days time. The Qornt are known for their warlike tendencies and battle-hardy population, but they disappeared without a trace around 200 years ago. Despite their sudden reappearance on Terrestrial territory, the Terrestrials caught no sight of them on their Navigational Monitor Service. \n\tThe Ambassador and his military decide to evacuate their land, an incredible feat thanks to their 15 million Terrestrials. They give themselves one day to plan their move, before announcing it to the general population. \n\tMagnan, one of the Ambassador's men, is ordered to explore Roolit and find the Qorn. Magnan, though hesitant, is forced to accept and take Retief with him. As they explore, they come across two Verpp, Zubb and Slun. After a quick battle, Magnan and Retief win and speak to the Verpp as their captives. Their race is a peaceful one, focused on exploring nature and other species. \n\tZubb and Slun escort them to the Qornt den, where they are feasting. Slun leaves them outside of Qornt Hall, located in Tarroon.  Zubb guides them into the grand chamber, where the Qornt are in the midst of their weeks-long feast. The bejeweled hall features Qornt of different sizes and statuses. Qorn, the chief, is seated above them all in a headdress and plumage. Zubb explains that each Qornt has their own fully-automated dreadnought, AKA warship. \n\tAfter hearing about their weaponry and seeing the Qornt in all their beastly glory, Magnan decides to retreat. Zubb, however, betrays them and pulls out two guns. He announces their arrival after forcing the Terrestrials in. Qorn belches in response. The Qornt chain the two Terrestrials. \n\tThe chief boasts about what the Qornt will do to the Terrestrials and squanders Magnan\u2019s hopes for surrender or peace. However, the other Qornt are not in agreement. They seem fairly nonchalant about the matter. They understand that this is their duty as Qornt, but they also would rather feast and boast than fight. \n\tRetief claims that the Terrestrials will use Tarroon as a target for their new hell bomb. He delivers his own ultimatum to the Qornt, breaking the chains around his wrists. Taroon\u2019s gravity and atmosphere lighten the weight, hence Retief\u2019s ability to break the chains. Retief challenges Qorn to a battle, despite Qorn\u2019s greater size and stature. \n\tRetief wins, ties Qorn up, and names himself their new leader. The Qornt still plan on invading the Terrestrials, however, and Retief must find a solution. It\u2019s revealed that the Verpp transforms into the Qornt like a caterpillar becomes a butterfly. They reach a solution, however. The Qornt become the new task force for the Peace Enforcement Corps. The Verpp establish their own Consul in the city. Ambassador Nitworth is pleased with this turn of events, and the Qornt are sent on a mission right away."}
{"id": "61434_1", "pid": "61434_1_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMIGHTIEST QORN\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n Sly, brave and truculent, the Qornt held all humans in contempt\u2014except one!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n I\n \n Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot platinum desk at his assembled staff.\n \n \"Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?\"\n \n There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward, looking solemn.\n \n \"They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. There was no record of where they went.\" He paused for effect.\n \n \"They have now reappeared\u2014occupying the inner planet of this system!\"\n \n \"But, sir,\" Second Secretary Magnan offered. \"That's uninhabited Terrestrial territory....\"\n \n \"Indeed, Mr. Magnan?\" Nitworth smiled icily. \"It appears the Qornt do not share that opinion.\" He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder before him, harrumphed and read aloud:\n \n His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive, Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence, and let Those who dare gird for the contest.\n \n \"Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory,\" Magnan said.\n \n Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger.\n \n \"We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!\"\n \n \"Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out\u2014\" the Military Attache began.\n \n \"There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on the surface,\" the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested frowns to settle into place.\n \n \"Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial controlled soil\u2014and without so much as a flicker from the instruments of the Navigational Monitor Service!\"\n \n The Military Attache blinked. \"That's absurd,\" he said flatly. Nitworth slapped the table.\n \n \"We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is\u2014the Qornt fleets are indetectible!\"\n \n \n\n \n The Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. \"In that case, we can't try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll have my boys start in to crack this thing,\" the Chief of the Confidential Terrestrial Source Section spoke up. \"I'll fit out a couple of volunteers with plastic beaks\u2014\"\n \n \"No cloak and dagger work, gentlemen! Long range policy will be worked out by Deep-Think teams back at the Department. Our role will be a holding action. Now I want suggestions for a comprehensive, well rounded and decisive course for meeting this threat. Any recommendation?\"\n \n The Political Officer placed his fingertips together. \"What about a stiff Note demanding an extra week's time?\"\n \n \"No! No begging,\" the Economic Officer objected. \"I'd say a calm, dignified, aggressive withdrawal\u2014as soon as possible.\"\n \n \"We don't want to give them the idea we spook easily,\" the Military Attache said. \"Let's delay the withdrawal\u2014say, until tomorrow.\"\n \n \"Early tomorrow,\" Magnan said. \"Or maybe later today.\"\n \n \"Well, I see you're of a mind with me,\" Nitworth nodded. \"Our plan of action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have a population of over fifteen million individuals to relocate.\" He eyed the Political Officer. \"I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.\" Nitworth rapped out instructions. Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan eased toward the door.\n \n \"Where are you going, Magnan?\" Nitworth snapped.\n \n \"Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It was a most interesting orientation lecture, Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to let us know how it works out.\"\n \n \"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these Qornt personally.\"\n \n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n \n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n \n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my head and do something rash if I go.\"\n \n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along. No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n \n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.\n \n \"Oh, Retief,\" Nitworth said. Retief turned.\n \n \"Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves\u2014in any direction.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of white beach with the blue sea beyond.\n \n \"A delightful vista,\" Magnan said, mopping at his face. \"A pity we couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right,\" Retief said. \"Why don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can observe.\"\n \n \"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to think of sightseeing.\"\n \n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n \n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're questioning Corps policy!\"\n \n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n \n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n \n \"It's directly down-slope\u2014\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan clutched at his arm.\n \n There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin, green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n \n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of a giant trunk.\n \n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps into the brush.\n \n A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun, darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free, turned\u2014and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.\n \n Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly.\n \n \"Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"You nailed both of them.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter,\" Magnan said.\n\"It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall and faces like that!\"\n \n The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green trousers.\n \n \"It's not broken,\" he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. \"Small thanks to you.\"\n \n Magnan smiled loftily. \"I daresay you'll think twice before interfering with peaceable diplomats in future.\"\n \n \"Diplomats? Surely you jest.\"\n \n \"Never mind us,\" Retief said. \"It's you fellows we'd like to talk about. How many of you are there?\"\n \n \"Only Zubb and myself.\"\n \n \"I mean altogether. How many Qornt?\"\n \n The alien whistled shrilly.\n \n \"Here, no signalling!\" Magnan snapped, looking around.\n \n \"That was merely an expression of amusement.\"\n \n \"You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous straits at the moment. I may fly into another rage, you know.\"\n \n \"Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished\u2014\" a small whistle escaped\u2014\"at being taken for a Qornt.\"\n \n \"Aren't you a Qornt?\"\n \n \"I? Great snail trails, no!\" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped the beaked face. \"Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it happens.\"\n \n \"You certainly look like Qornt.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all\u2014except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course, they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually.\"\n \n \"A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?\"\n \n \"Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt.\"\n \n \"I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock\u2014descended from a common ancestor, perhaps.\"\n \n \"We are all Pud's creatures.\"\n \n \"What are the differences between you, then?\"\n \n \"Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to their level.\"\n \n \"Do you know anything about a Note passed to the Terrestrial Ambassador at Smorbrod?\" Retief asked.\n \n \n\n \n The beak twitched. \"Smorbrod? I know of no place called Smorbrod.\"\n \n \"The outer planet of this system.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes. We call it Guzzum. I had heard that some sort of creatures had established a settlement there, but I confess I pay little note to such matters.\"\n \n \"We're wasting time, Retief,\" Magnan said. \"We must truss these chaps up, hurry back to the boat and make our escape. You heard what they said.\"\n \n \"Are there any Qornt down there at the harbor, where the boats are?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"At Tarroon, you mean? Oh, yes. Planning some adventure.\"\n \n \"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the evacuees!\"\n \n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n \n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n \n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n \n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n \n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in all?\"\n \n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only. There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n \n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum\u2014unilaterally?\"\n \n \"I suppose so; it sounds like them. A truculent group, you know. And interplanetary relations are rather a hobby of theirs.\"\n \n Zubb moaned and stirred. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. He spoke to his companion in a shrill alien clatter of consonants.\n \n \"What did he say?\"\n \n \"Poor Zubb. He blames me for his bruises, since it was my idea to gather you as specimens.\"\n \n \"You should have known better than to tackle that fierce-looking creature,\" Zubb said, pointing his beak at Magnan.\n \n \"How does it happen that you speak Terrestrial?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"Oh, one picks up all sorts of dialects.\"\n \n \"It's quite charming, really,\" Magnan said. \"Such a quaint, archaic accent.\"\n \n \"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of reception would we get?\"\n \n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy mating\u2014such a tedious business\u2014and of course the Qornt are tied up with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice of you.\"\n \n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne\u2014who openly avow their occupied world\u2014would ignore Terrestrials in their midst?\"\n \n \"If at all possible.\"\n \n Retief got to his feet.\n \n \"I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and attract a little attention.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n \"I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way,\" Magnan puffed, trotting at Retief's side. \"These fellows Zubb and Slun\u2014Oh, they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led into a trap?\"\n \n \"We can't.\"\n \n Magnan stopped short. \"Let's go back.\"\n \n \"All right,\" Retief said. \"Of course there may be an ambush\u2014\"\n \n Magnan moved off. \"Let's keep going.\"\n \n The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope.\n \n \"You can find your way easily enough from here,\" he said. \"You'll excuse us, I hope\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense, Slun!\" Zubb pushed forward. \"I'll escort our guests to Qornt Hall.\" He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back.\n \n \"I don't like it, Retief,\" Magnan whispered. \"Those fellows are plotting mischief.\"\n \n \"Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you.\"\n \n \"That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a patient man, but there are occasions\u2014\"\n \n \"Come along, please,\" Zubb called. \"Another ten minutes' walk\u2014\"\n \n \"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n \n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n \n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n \n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n \n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n \n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch, ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.\n \n \"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n \n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n \n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n \n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n \n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n \n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"\n \n \"These few hotheads are permitted to embroil the planet in war?\"\n \n \"Oh, they don't embroil the planet in war. They merely\u2014\"\n \n \"Retief, this is fantastic! I've heard of iron-fisted military cliques before, but this is madness!\"\n \n \"Come softly, now.\" Zubb beckoned, moving toward a bend in the yellow-lit corridor. Retief and Magnan moved forward.\n \n \n\n \n The corridor debouched through a high double door into a vast oval chamber, high-domed, gloomy, paneled in dark wood and hung with tattered banners, scarred halberds, pikes, rusted longswords, crossed spears over patinaed hauberks, pitted radiation armor, corroded power rifles, the immense mummified heads of horned and fanged animals. Great guttering torches in wall brackets and in stands along the length of the long table shed a smoky light that reflected from the mirror polish of the red granite floor, gleamed on polished silver bowls and paper-thin glass, shone jewel-red and gold through dark bottles\u2014and cast long flickering shadows behind the fifteen trolls at the board.\n \n Lesser trolls\u2014beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed\u2014trotted briskly, bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n \n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n\"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n \n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt\u2014the tallest of the feasters\u2014he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n \n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really must hurry along\u2014\"\n \n \"That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from the other Centers as well.\"\n \n \"What kind of vessels? Warships?\"\n \n \"Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?\"\n \n \"I don't suppose,\" Magnan said casually, \"that you'd know the type, tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?\"\n \n \"They're fully automated twenty-thousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts. They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given his ship.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set of toy sailboats!\"\n \n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n \n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n \n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer the matter to committee.\"\n \n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss having a cosy chat.\"\n \n There was a pause.\n \n \"Ah ... Retief,\" Magnan said. \"Zubb has just presented a most compelling argument....\"\n \n \n\n \n Retief turned. Zubb stood gripping an ornately decorated power pistol in one bony hand, a slim needler in the other. Both were pointed at Magnan's chest.\n \n \"I suspected you had hidden qualities, Zubb,\" Retief commented.\n \n \"See here, Zubb! We're diplomats!\" Magnan started.\n \n \"Careful, Mr. Magnan; you may goad him to a frenzy.\"\n \n \"By no means,\" Zubb whistled. \"I much prefer to observe the frenzy of the Qornt when presented with the news that two peaceful Verpp have been assaulted and kidnapped by bullying interlopers. If there's anything that annoys the Qornt, it's Qornt-like behavior in others. Now step along, please.\"\n \n \"Rest assured, this will be reported!\"\n \n \"I doubt it.\"\n \n \"You'll face the wrath of Enlightened Galactic Opinion!\"\n \n \"Oh? How big a navy does Enlightened Galactic Opinion have?\"\n \n \"Stop scaring him, Mr. Magnan. He may get nervous and shoot.\" Retief stepped into the banquet hall, headed for the resplendent figure at the head of the table. A trio of flute-players broke off in mid-bleat, staring. An inverted pyramid of tumblers blinked as Retief swung past, followed by Magnan and the tall Verpp. The shrill chatter at the table faded.\n \n Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his chair\u2014a low, heavily padded stool\u2014and stared unwinking at Retief, moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n \n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n \n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.\n \n \"Not bad,\" Retief said admiringly. \"Maybe we could get up a match between you and Ambassador Sternwheeler. You've got the volume on him, but he's got timbre.\"\n \n \"So,\" Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. \"You come from Guzzum, eh? Or Smorbrod, as I think you call it. What is it you're after? More time? A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?\" He slammed a bony hand against the table. \"The answer is no !\"\n \n Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. \"Chain that one.\" He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. \"This one's bigger; you'd best chain him, too.\"\n \n \"Why, your Excellency\u2014\" Magnan started, stepping forward.\n \n \"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on you.\"\n \n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered\u2014\"\n \n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries! I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\n \n \n\n \n There was a momentary silence from all sides.\n \n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with flame-colored plumes.\n \n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I thought I'd made my point!\"\n \n \"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n \n \"You bet.\"\n \n \"I'm convinced.\"\n \n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's us.\"\n \n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring eyes.\n \n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n \n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration\u2014\"\n \n \"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\" He belched again.\n \n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n \n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms. Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the ends and closed it.\n \n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n \n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.\n \n \"You can do better than that,\" Qorn hooted. \"Now here's a suggestion: we carve them up a little\u2014lop off the external labiae and pinnae, say\u2014and ship them back.\"\n \n \"Good lord! Retief, he's talking about cutting off our ears and sending us home mutilated! What a barbaric proposal!\"\n \n \"It wouldn't be the first time a Terrestrial diplomat got a trimming,\" Retief commented.\n \n \"It should have the effect of stimulating the Terries to put up a reasonable scrap,\" Qorn said judiciously. \"I have a feeling that they're thinking of giving up without a struggle.\"\n \n \"Oh, I doubt that,\" the blue-and-flame Qornt said. \"Why should they?\"\n \n Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\" he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n \n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n \n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n \n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n\"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can assure you, it's useless. We Qornt like to fight.\"\n \n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\" Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver an Ultimatum.\"\n \n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.\n \n \"We plan to use this planet for target practice,\" Retief said. \"A new type hell bomb we've worked out. Have all your people off of it in seventy-two hours, or suffer the consequences.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n \"You have the gall,\" Qorn stormed, \"to stand here in the center of Qornt Hall\u2014uninvited, at that\u2014and in chains\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, these,\" Retief said. He tensed his arms. The soft aluminum links stretched and broke. He shook the light metal free. \"We diplomats like to go along with colorful local customs, but I wouldn't want to mislead you. Now, as to the evacuation of Roolit I\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Zubb screeched, waved the guns. The Qornt were jabbering.\n \n \"I told you they were brutes,\" Zubb shrilled.\n \n Qorn slammed his fist down on the table. \"I don't care what they are!\" he honked. \"Evacuate, hell! I can field eighty-five combat-ready ships!\"\n \n \"And we can englobe every one of them with a thousand Peace Enforcers with a hundred megatons/second firepower each.\"\n \n \"Retief.\" Magnan tugged at his sleeve. \"Don't forget their superdrive.\"\n \n \"That's all right. They don't have one.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"We'll take you on!\" Qorn French-horned. \"We're the Qorn! We glory in battle! We live in fame or go down in\u2014\"\n \n \"Hogwash,\" the flame-and-blue Qorn cut in. \"If it wasn't for you, Qorn, we could sit around and feast and brag and enjoy life without having to prove anything.\"\n \n \"Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here,\" Retief said. \"I think the rest of the boys would listen to reason\u2014\"\n \n \"Over my dead body!\"\n \n \"My idea exactly,\" Retief said. \"You claim you can lick any man in the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan hovered at Retief's side. \"Twelve feet tall,\" he moaned. \"And did you notice the size of those hands?\"\n \n Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings.\n\"I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds here.\"\n \n \"But that phenomenal reach\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me, I'll get a crack at him.\"\n \n Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort.\n \n \"Enough! Let me at the upstart!\"\n \n Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens\u2014both servitors and bejeweled Qornt\u2014formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the combatants.\n \n Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn bent to haul Retief from his leg\u2014and staggered back as a haymaker took him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief leaped clear.\n \n Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leaned, arms windmilling, crashed to the floor. Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching in vain for Retief.\n \n Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him.\n \n \"Need I remind you, sir,\" he said icily, \"that this is an official diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested parties.\"\n \n Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. \"I must ask you to hand me your weapons, Zubb.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" Zubb began.\n \n \"I may lose my temper,\" Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned back to watch the encounter.\n \n Retief had thrown a turn of violet silk around Qorn's left wrist, bound it to the alien's neck. Another wisp of stuff floated from Qorn's shoulder. Retief, still holding Qorn in an awkward sprawl, wrapped it around one outflung leg, trussed ankle and thigh together. Qorn flopped, hooting. At each movement, the constricting loop around his neck, jerked his head back, the green crest tossing wildly.\n \n \"If I were you, I'd relax,\" Retief said, rising and releasing his grip. Qorn got a leg under him; Retief kicked it. Qorn's chin hit the floor with a hollow clack. He wilted, an ungainly tangle of over-long limbs and gay silks.\n \n Retief turned to the watching crowd. \"Next?\" he called.\n \n The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. \"Maybe this would be a good time to elect a new leader,\" he said. \"Now, my qualifications\u2014\"\n \n \"Sit down,\" Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table, seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. \"A couple of you finish trussing Qorn up for me.\"\n \n \"But we must select a leader!\"\n \n \"That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"As I see it,\" Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine glass, \"you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like to fight.\"\n \n \"We don't mind a little fighting\u2014within reason. And, of course, as Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush things?\"\n \n \"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n \n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one among us who's a slave to instinct\u2014and, naturally, we have to follow him.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n \n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest community singing\u2014\"\n \n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would happen?\"\n \n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n \n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with the new Qornt stepping on our heels\u2014\"\n \n \"I've lost the thread,\" Magnan said. \"Who are the new Qornt?\"\n \n \"After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course. The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize into Verpp\u2014\"\n \n \"You mean Slun and Zubb\u2014the mild-natured naturalists\u2014will become warmongers like Qorn?\"\n \n \"Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old saying goes.\"\n \n \"What do Qornt turn into?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood.\"\n \n \"Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?\" Magnan asked. \"What about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?\"\n \n \"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you Terrestrials over on Guzzum\u2014that was a mad notion. We had no idea what your strength was.\"\n \n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've had diplomatic relations and all\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n \n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"\n \n \"Only a dead Qornt stays home when Attack day comes. And even if he orders us all to cut our own throats, there are still the other Centers\u2014all with their own leaders. No, gentlemen, the Invasion is definitely on.\"\n \n \"Why don't you go invade somebody else?\" Magnan suggested. \"I could name some very attractive prospects\u2014outside my sector, of course.\"\n \n \"Hold everything,\" Retief said. \"I think we've got the basis of a deal here....\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31555, "query_start_index": 31557, "query_end_index": 31597, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "A diplomatic corps of humans (Terrestrials) receives an ultimatum from the Qornt warlike alien race telling them to evacuate a planet or be destroyed. The alien race appeared suddenly and undetected by the humans. Two men, Mangan and Retief, are dispatched to the alien planet to investigate while an evacuation plan can be developed.\n\nMangan and Retief come upon two aliens who they mistake for Qornt but are actually Verpp. They are able to capture them and they lead the men to the Qornt community. Once their their captives turn on them and capture the men, binding them in chains.\n\nThe Qornt leader is uninterested in diplomatic discussions and is intent on invading the human planet. At this point Retief breaks his bonds which are only weak aluminum and defeats the Qornt leader in physical combat. Retief convinces the remaining Qornt to abandon the invasion plan and elect himself as their leader.\n\nWhen the human ambassador returns to discuss the evacuation, Mangan and Retief inform him that the Qornt have remarkably been folded into the Terrestrial Peace Corps and have been sent out on mission. Retief and Mangan will now be in charge of recruitment of Alien races into the human community."}
{"id": "61434_1", "pid": "61434_1_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nMIGHTIEST QORN\n \n\n BY KEITH LAUMER\n \n\n Sly, brave and truculent, the Qornt held all humans in contempt\u2014except one!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n I\n \n Ambassador Nitworth glowered across his mirror-polished, nine-foot platinum desk at his assembled staff.\n \n \"Gentlemen, are any of you familiar with a race known as the Qornt?\"\n \n There was a moment of profound silence. Nitworth leaned forward, looking solemn.\n \n \"They were a warlike race known in this sector back in Concordiat times, perhaps two hundred years ago. They vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. There was no record of where they went.\" He paused for effect.\n \n \"They have now reappeared\u2014occupying the inner planet of this system!\"\n \n \"But, sir,\" Second Secretary Magnan offered. \"That's uninhabited Terrestrial territory....\"\n \n \"Indeed, Mr. Magnan?\" Nitworth smiled icily. \"It appears the Qornt do not share that opinion.\" He plucked a heavy parchment from a folder before him, harrumphed and read aloud:\n \n His Supreme Excellency The Qorn, Regent of Qornt, Over-Lord of the Galactic Destiny, Greets the Terrestrials and, with reference to the presence in mandated territory of Terrestrial squatters, has the honor to advise that he will require the use of his outer world on the thirtieth day. Then will the Qornt come with steel and fire. Receive, Terrestrials, renewed assurances of my awareness of your existence, and let Those who dare gird for the contest.\n \n \"Frankly, I wouldn't call it conciliatory,\" Magnan said.\n \n Nitworth tapped the paper with a finger.\n \n \"We have been served, gentlemen, with nothing less than an Ultimatum!\"\n \n \"Well, we'll soon straighten these fellows out\u2014\" the Military Attache began.\n \n \"There happens to be more to this piece of truculence than appears on the surface,\" the Ambassador cut in. He paused, waiting for interested frowns to settle into place.\n \n \"Note, gentlemen, that these invaders have appeared on terrestrial controlled soil\u2014and without so much as a flicker from the instruments of the Navigational Monitor Service!\"\n \n The Military Attache blinked. \"That's absurd,\" he said flatly. Nitworth slapped the table.\n \n \"We're up against something new, gentlemen! I've considered every hypothesis from cloaks of invisibility to time travel! The fact is\u2014the Qornt fleets are indetectible!\"\n \n \n\n \n The Military Attache pulled at his lower lip. \"In that case, we can't try conclusions with these fellows until we have an indetectible drive of our own. I recommend a crash project. In the meantime\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll have my boys start in to crack this thing,\" the Chief of the Confidential Terrestrial Source Section spoke up. \"I'll fit out a couple of volunteers with plastic beaks\u2014\"\n \n \"No cloak and dagger work, gentlemen! Long range policy will be worked out by Deep-Think teams back at the Department. Our role will be a holding action. Now I want suggestions for a comprehensive, well rounded and decisive course for meeting this threat. Any recommendation?\"\n \n The Political Officer placed his fingertips together. \"What about a stiff Note demanding an extra week's time?\"\n \n \"No! No begging,\" the Economic Officer objected. \"I'd say a calm, dignified, aggressive withdrawal\u2014as soon as possible.\"\n \n \"We don't want to give them the idea we spook easily,\" the Military Attache said. \"Let's delay the withdrawal\u2014say, until tomorrow.\"\n \n \"Early tomorrow,\" Magnan said. \"Or maybe later today.\"\n \n \"Well, I see you're of a mind with me,\" Nitworth nodded. \"Our plan of action is clear, but it remains to be implemented. We have a population of over fifteen million individuals to relocate.\" He eyed the Political Officer. \"I want five proposals for resettlement on my desk by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.\" Nitworth rapped out instructions. Harried-looking staff members arose and hurried from the room. Magnan eased toward the door.\n \n \"Where are you going, Magnan?\" Nitworth snapped.\n \n \"Since you're so busy, I thought I'd just slip back down to Com Inq. It was a most interesting orientation lecture, Mr. Ambassador. Be sure to let us know how it works out.\"\n \n \"Kindly return to your chair,\" Nitworth said coldly. \"A number of chores remain to be assigned. I think you, Magnan, need a little field experience. I want you to get over to Roolit I and take a look at these Qornt personally.\"\n \n Magnan's mouth opened and closed soundlessly.\n \n \"Not afraid of a few Qornt, are you, Magnan?\"\n \n \"Afraid? Good lord, no, ha ha. It's just that I'm afraid I may lose my head and do something rash if I go.\"\n \n \"Nonsense! A diplomat is immune to heroic impulses. Take Retief along. No dawdling, now! I want you on the way in two hours. Notify the transport pool at once. Now get going!\"\n \n Magnan nodded unhappily and went into the hall.\n \n \"Oh, Retief,\" Nitworth said. Retief turned.\n \n \"Try to restrain Mr. Magnan from any impulsive moves\u2014in any direction.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Retief and Magnan topped a ridge and looked down across a slope of towering tree-shrubs and glossy violet-stemmed palms set among flamboyant blossoms of yellow and red, reaching down to a strip of white beach with the blue sea beyond.\n \n \"A delightful vista,\" Magnan said, mopping at his face. \"A pity we couldn't locate the Qornt. We'll go back now and report\u2014\"\n \n \"I'm pretty sure the settlement is off to the right,\" Retief said. \"Why don't you head back for the boat, while I ease over and see what I can observe.\"\n \n \"Retief, we're engaged in a serious mission. This is not a time to think of sightseeing.\"\n \n \"I'd like to take a good look at what we're giving away.\"\n \n \"See here, Retief! One might almost receive the impression that you're questioning Corps policy!\"\n \n \"One might, at that. The Qornt have made their play, but I think it might be valuable to take a look at their cards before we fold. If I'm not back at the boat in an hour, lift without me.\"\n \n \"You expect me to make my way back alone?\"\n \n \"It's directly down-slope\u2014\" Retief broke off, listening. Magnan clutched at his arm.\n \n There was a sound of crackling foliage. Twenty feet ahead, a leafy branch swung aside. An eight-foot biped stepped into view, long, thin, green-clad legs with back-bending knees moving in quick, bird-like steps. A pair of immense black-lensed goggles covered staring eyes set among bushy green hair above a great bone-white beak. The crest bobbed as the creature cocked its head, listening.\n \n Magnan gulped audibly. The Qornt froze, head tilted, beak aimed directly at the spot where the Terrestrials stood in the deep shade of a giant trunk.\n \n \"I'll go for help,\" Magnan squeaked. He whirled and took three leaps into the brush.\n \n A second great green-clad figure rose up to block his way. He spun, darted to the left. The first Qornt pounced, grappled Magnan to its narrow chest. Magnan yelled, threshing and kicking, broke free, turned\u2014and collided with the eight-foot alien, coming in fast from the right. All three went down in a tangle of limbs.\n \n Retief jumped forward, hauled Magnan free, thrust him aside and stopped, right fist cocked. The two Qornt lay groaning feebly.\n \n \"Nice piece of work, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"You nailed both of them.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Those undoubtedly are the most bloodthirsty, aggressive, merciless countenances it has ever been my misfortune to encounter,\" Magnan said.\n\"It hardly seems fair. Eight feet tall and faces like that!\"\n \n The smaller of the two captive Qornt ran long, slender fingers over a bony shin, from which he had turned back the tight-fitting green trousers.\n \n \"It's not broken,\" he whistled nasally in passable Terrestrial, eyeing Magnan through the heavy goggles, now badly cracked. \"Small thanks to you.\"\n \n Magnan smiled loftily. \"I daresay you'll think twice before interfering with peaceable diplomats in future.\"\n \n \"Diplomats? Surely you jest.\"\n \n \"Never mind us,\" Retief said. \"It's you fellows we'd like to talk about. How many of you are there?\"\n \n \"Only Zubb and myself.\"\n \n \"I mean altogether. How many Qornt?\"\n \n The alien whistled shrilly.\n \n \"Here, no signalling!\" Magnan snapped, looking around.\n \n \"That was merely an expression of amusement.\"\n \n \"You find the situation amusing? I assure you, sir, you are in perilous straits at the moment. I may fly into another rage, you know.\"\n \n \"Please, restrain yourself. I was merely somewhat astonished\u2014\" a small whistle escaped\u2014\"at being taken for a Qornt.\"\n \n \"Aren't you a Qornt?\"\n \n \"I? Great snail trails, no!\" More stifled whistles of amusement escaped the beaked face. \"Both Zubb and I are Verpp. Naturalists, as it happens.\"\n \n \"You certainly look like Qornt.\"\n \n \"Oh, not at all\u2014except perhaps to a Terrestrial. The Qornt are sturdily built rascals, all over ten feet in height. And, of course, they do nothing but quarrel. A drone caste, actually.\"\n \n \"A caste? You mean they're biologically the same as you?\"\n \n \"Not at all! A Verpp wouldn't think of fertilizing a Qornt.\"\n \n \"I mean to say, you are of the same basic stock\u2014descended from a common ancestor, perhaps.\"\n \n \"We are all Pud's creatures.\"\n \n \"What are the differences between you, then?\"\n \n \"Why, the Qornt are argumentive, boastful, lacking in appreciation for the finer things of life. One dreads to contemplate descending to their level.\"\n \n \"Do you know anything about a Note passed to the Terrestrial Ambassador at Smorbrod?\" Retief asked.\n \n \n\n \n The beak twitched. \"Smorbrod? I know of no place called Smorbrod.\"\n \n \"The outer planet of this system.\"\n \n \"Oh, yes. We call it Guzzum. I had heard that some sort of creatures had established a settlement there, but I confess I pay little note to such matters.\"\n \n \"We're wasting time, Retief,\" Magnan said. \"We must truss these chaps up, hurry back to the boat and make our escape. You heard what they said.\"\n \n \"Are there any Qornt down there at the harbor, where the boats are?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"At Tarroon, you mean? Oh, yes. Planning some adventure.\"\n \n \"That would be the invasion of Smorbrod,\" Magnan said. \"And unless we hurry, Retief, we're likely to be caught there with the last of the evacuees!\"\n \n \"How many Qornt would you say there are at Tarroon?\"\n \n \"Oh, a very large number. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.\"\n \n \"Fifteen or twenty what?\" Magnan looked perplexed.\n \n \"Fifteen or twenty Qornt.\"\n \n \"You mean that there are only fifteen or twenty individual Qornt in all?\"\n \n Another whistle. \"Not at all. I was referring to the local Qornt only. There are more at the other Centers, of course.\"\n \n \"And the Qornt are responsible for the ultimatum\u2014unilaterally?\"\n \n \"I suppose so; it sounds like them. A truculent group, you know. And interplanetary relations are rather a hobby of theirs.\"\n \n Zubb moaned and stirred. He sat up slowly, rubbing his head. He spoke to his companion in a shrill alien clatter of consonants.\n \n \"What did he say?\"\n \n \"Poor Zubb. He blames me for his bruises, since it was my idea to gather you as specimens.\"\n \n \"You should have known better than to tackle that fierce-looking creature,\" Zubb said, pointing his beak at Magnan.\n \n \"How does it happen that you speak Terrestrial?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"Oh, one picks up all sorts of dialects.\"\n \n \"It's quite charming, really,\" Magnan said. \"Such a quaint, archaic accent.\"\n \n \"Suppose we went down to Tarroon,\" Retief asked. \"What kind of reception would we get?\"\n \n \"That depends. I wouldn't recommend interfering with the Gwil or the Rheuk; it's their nest-mending time, you know. The Boog will be busy mating\u2014such a tedious business\u2014and of course the Qornt are tied up with their ceremonial feasting. I'm afraid no one will take any notice of you.\"\n \n \"Do you mean to say,\" Magnan demanded, \"that these ferocious Qornt, who have issued an ultimatum to the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne\u2014who openly avow their occupied world\u2014would ignore Terrestrials in their midst?\"\n \n \"If at all possible.\"\n \n Retief got to his feet.\n \n \"I think our course is clear, Mr. Magnan. It's up to us to go down and attract a little attention.\"\n \n \n\n III\n \n \"I'm not at all sure we're going about this in the right way,\" Magnan puffed, trotting at Retief's side. \"These fellows Zubb and Slun\u2014Oh, they seem affable enough, but how can we be sure we're not being led into a trap?\"\n \n \"We can't.\"\n \n Magnan stopped short. \"Let's go back.\"\n \n \"All right,\" Retief said. \"Of course there may be an ambush\u2014\"\n \n Magnan moved off. \"Let's keep going.\"\n \n The party emerged from the undergrowth at the edge of a great brush-grown mound. Slun took the lead, rounded the flank of the hillock, halted at a rectangular opening cut into the slope.\n \n \"You can find your way easily enough from here,\" he said. \"You'll excuse us, I hope\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense, Slun!\" Zubb pushed forward. \"I'll escort our guests to Qornt Hall.\" He twittered briefly to his fellow Verpp. Slun twittered back.\n \n \"I don't like it, Retief,\" Magnan whispered. \"Those fellows are plotting mischief.\"\n \n \"Threaten them with violence, Mr Magnan. They're scared of you.\"\n \n \"That's true. And the drubbing they received was well-deserved. I'm a patient man, but there are occasions\u2014\"\n \n \"Come along, please,\" Zubb called. \"Another ten minutes' walk\u2014\"\n \n \"See here, we have no interest in investigating this barrow,\" Magnan announced. \"We wish you to take us direct to Tarroon to interview your military leaders regarding the ultimatum!\"\n \n \"Yes, yes, of course. Qornt Hall lies here inside the village.\"\n \n \"This is Tarroon?\"\n \n \"A modest civic center, sir, but there are those who love it.\"\n \n \"No wonder we didn't observe their works from the air,\" Magnan muttered. \"Camouflaged.\" He moved hesitantly through the opening.\n \n The party moved along a wide, deserted tunnel which sloped down steeply, then leveled off and branched. Zubb took the center branch, ducking slightly under the nine-foot ceiling lit at intervals with what appeared to be primitive incandescent panels.\n \n \"Few signs of an advanced technology here,\" Magnan whispered. \"These creatures must devote all their talents to warlike enterprise.\"\n \n Ahead, Zubb slowed. A distant susurration was audible, a sustained high-pitched screeching. \"Softly, now. We approach Qornt Hall. They can be an irascible lot when disturbed at their feasting.\"\n \n \"When will the feast be over?\" Magnan called hoarsely.\n \n \"In another few weeks, I should imagine, if, as you say, they've scheduled an invasion for next month.\"\n \n \"Look here, Zubb.\" Magnan shook a finger at the tall alien. \"How is it that these Qornt are allowed to embark on piratical ventures of this sort without reference to the wishes of the majority?\"\n \n \"Oh, the majority of the Qornt favor the move, I imagine.\"\n \n \"These few hotheads are permitted to embroil the planet in war?\"\n \n \"Oh, they don't embroil the planet in war. They merely\u2014\"\n \n \"Retief, this is fantastic! I've heard of iron-fisted military cliques before, but this is madness!\"\n \n \"Come softly, now.\" Zubb beckoned, moving toward a bend in the yellow-lit corridor. Retief and Magnan moved forward.\n \n \n\n \n The corridor debouched through a high double door into a vast oval chamber, high-domed, gloomy, paneled in dark wood and hung with tattered banners, scarred halberds, pikes, rusted longswords, crossed spears over patinaed hauberks, pitted radiation armor, corroded power rifles, the immense mummified heads of horned and fanged animals. Great guttering torches in wall brackets and in stands along the length of the long table shed a smoky light that reflected from the mirror polish of the red granite floor, gleamed on polished silver bowls and paper-thin glass, shone jewel-red and gold through dark bottles\u2014and cast long flickering shadows behind the fifteen trolls at the board.\n \n Lesser trolls\u2014beaked, bush-haired, great-eyed\u2014trotted briskly, bird-kneed, bearing steaming platters, stood in groups of three strumming slender bottle-shaped lutes, or pranced an intricate-patterned dance, unnoticed in the shrill uproar as each of the magnificently draped, belted, feathered and jeweled Qornt carried on a shouted conversation with an equally noisy fellow.\n \n \"A most interesting display of barbaric splendor,\" Magnan breathed.\n\"Now we'd better be getting back.\"\n \n \"Ah, a moment,\" Zubb said. \"Observe the Qornt\u2014the tallest of the feasters\u2014he with the head-dress of crimson, purple, silver and pink.\"\n \n \"Twelve feet if he's an inch,\" Magnan estimated. \"And now we really must hurry along\u2014\"\n \n \"That one is chief among these rowdies. I'm sure you'll want a word with him. He controls not only the Tarroonian vessels but those from the other Centers as well.\"\n \n \"What kind of vessels? Warships?\"\n \n \"Certainly. What other kind would the Qornt bother with?\"\n \n \"I don't suppose,\" Magnan said casually, \"that you'd know the type, tonnage, armament and manning of these vessels? And how many units comprise the fleet? And where they're based at present?\"\n \n \"They're fully automated twenty-thousand-ton all-purpose dreadnaughts. They mount a variety of weapons. The Qornt are fond of that sort of thing. Each of the Qornt has his own, of course. They're virtually identical, except for the personal touches each individual has given his ship.\"\n \n \"Great heavens, Retief!\" Magnan exclaimed in a whisper. \"It sounds as though these brutes employ a battle armada as simpler souls might a set of toy sailboats!\"\n \n Retief stepped past Magnan and Zubb to study the feasting hall. \"I can see that their votes would carry all the necessary weight.\"\n \n \"And now an interview with the Qorn himself,\" Zubb shrilled. \"If you'll kindly step along, gentlemen....\"\n \n \"That won't be necessary,\" Magnan said hastily, \"I've decided to refer the matter to committee.\"\n \n \"After having come so far,\" Zubb said, \"it would be a pity to miss having a cosy chat.\"\n \n There was a pause.\n \n \"Ah ... Retief,\" Magnan said. \"Zubb has just presented a most compelling argument....\"\n \n \n\n \n Retief turned. Zubb stood gripping an ornately decorated power pistol in one bony hand, a slim needler in the other. Both were pointed at Magnan's chest.\n \n \"I suspected you had hidden qualities, Zubb,\" Retief commented.\n \n \"See here, Zubb! We're diplomats!\" Magnan started.\n \n \"Careful, Mr. Magnan; you may goad him to a frenzy.\"\n \n \"By no means,\" Zubb whistled. \"I much prefer to observe the frenzy of the Qornt when presented with the news that two peaceful Verpp have been assaulted and kidnapped by bullying interlopers. If there's anything that annoys the Qornt, it's Qornt-like behavior in others. Now step along, please.\"\n \n \"Rest assured, this will be reported!\"\n \n \"I doubt it.\"\n \n \"You'll face the wrath of Enlightened Galactic Opinion!\"\n \n \"Oh? How big a navy does Enlightened Galactic Opinion have?\"\n \n \"Stop scaring him, Mr. Magnan. He may get nervous and shoot.\" Retief stepped into the banquet hall, headed for the resplendent figure at the head of the table. A trio of flute-players broke off in mid-bleat, staring. An inverted pyramid of tumblers blinked as Retief swung past, followed by Magnan and the tall Verpp. The shrill chatter at the table faded.\n \n Qorn turned as Retief came up, blinking three-inch eyes. Zubb stepped forward, gibbered, waving his arms excitedly. Qorn pushed back his chair\u2014a low, heavily padded stool\u2014and stared unwinking at Retief, moving his head to bring first one great round eye, then the other, to bear. There were small blue veins in the immense fleshy beak. The bushy hair, springing out in a giant halo around the grayish, porous-skinned face, was wiry, stiff, moss-green, with tufts of chartreuse fuzz surrounding what appeared to be tympanic membranes. The tall head-dress of scarlet silk and purple feathers was slightly askew, and a loop of pink pearls had slipped down above one eye.\n \n Zubb finished his speech and fell silent, breathing hard.\n \n Qorn looked Retief over in silence, then belched.\n \n \"Not bad,\" Retief said admiringly. \"Maybe we could get up a match between you and Ambassador Sternwheeler. You've got the volume on him, but he's got timbre.\"\n \n \"So,\" Qorn hooted in a resonant tenor. \"You come from Guzzum, eh? Or Smorbrod, as I think you call it. What is it you're after? More time? A compromise? Negotiations? Peace?\" He slammed a bony hand against the table. \"The answer is no !\"\n \n Zubb twittered. Qorn cocked an eye, motioned to a servant. \"Chain that one.\" He indicated Magnan. His eyes went to Retief. \"This one's bigger; you'd best chain him, too.\"\n \n \"Why, your Excellency\u2014\" Magnan started, stepping forward.\n \n \"Stay back!\" Qorn hooted. \"Stand over there where I can keep an eye on you.\"\n \n \"Your Excellency, I'm empowered\u2014\"\n \n \"Not here, you're not!\" Qorn trumpeted. \"Want peace, do you? Well, I don't want peace! I've had a surfeit of peace these last two centuries! I want action! Loot! Adventure! Glory!\" He turned to look down the table. \"How about it, fellows? It's war to the knife, eh?\"\n \n \n\n \n There was a momentary silence from all sides.\n \n \"I guess so,\" grunted a giant Qornt in iridescent blue with flame-colored plumes.\n \n Qorn's eyes bulged. He half rose. \"We've been all over this,\" he bassooned. He clamped bony fingers on the hilt of a light rapier. \"I thought I'd made my point!\"\n \n \"Oh, sure, Qorn.\"\n \n \"You bet.\"\n \n \"I'm convinced.\"\n \n Qorn rumbled and resumed his seat. \"All for one and one for all, that's us.\"\n \n \"And you're the one, eh, Qorn?\" Retief commented.\n \n Magnan cleared his throat. \"I sense that some of you gentlemen are not convinced of the wisdom of this move,\" he piped, looking along the table at the silks, jewels, beaks, feather-decked crests and staring eyes.\n \n \"Silence!\" Qorn hooted. \"No use your talking to my loyal lieutenants anyway,\" he added. \"They do whatever I convince them they ought to do.\"\n \n \"But I'm sure that on more mature consideration\u2014\"\n \n \"I can lick any Qornt in the house.\" Qorn said. \"That's why I'm Qorn.\" He belched again.\n \n A servant came up staggering under a weight of chain, dropped it with a crash at Magnan's feet. Zubb aimed the guns while the servant wrapped three loops around Magnan's wrists, snapped a lock in place.\n \n \"You next!\" The guns pointed at Retief's chest. He held out his arms. Four loops of silvery-gray chain in half-inch links dropped around them. The servant cinched them up tight, squeezed a lock through the ends and closed it.\n \n \"Now,\" Qorn said, lolling back in his chair, glass in hand. \"There's a bit of sport to be had here, lads. What shall we do with them?\"\n \n \"Let them go,\" the blue and flame Qornt said glumly.\n \n \"You can do better than that,\" Qorn hooted. \"Now here's a suggestion: we carve them up a little\u2014lop off the external labiae and pinnae, say\u2014and ship them back.\"\n \n \"Good lord! Retief, he's talking about cutting off our ears and sending us home mutilated! What a barbaric proposal!\"\n \n \"It wouldn't be the first time a Terrestrial diplomat got a trimming,\" Retief commented.\n \n \"It should have the effect of stimulating the Terries to put up a reasonable scrap,\" Qorn said judiciously. \"I have a feeling that they're thinking of giving up without a struggle.\"\n \n \"Oh, I doubt that,\" the blue-and-flame Qornt said. \"Why should they?\"\n \n Qorn rolled an eye at Retief and another at Magnan. \"Take these two,\" he hooted. \"I'll wager they came here to negotiate a surrender!\"\n \n \"Well,\" Magnan started.\n \n \"Hold it, Mr. Magnan,\" Retief said. \"I'll tell him.\"\n \n \"What's your proposal?\" Qorn whistled, taking a gulp from his goblet.\n\"A fifty-fifty split? Monetary reparations? Alternate territory? I can assure you, it's useless. We Qornt like to fight.\"\n \n \"I'm afraid you've gotten the wrong impression, your Excellency,\" Retief said blandly. \"We didn't come to negotiate. We came to deliver an Ultimatum.\"\n \n \"What?\" Qorn trumpeted. Behind Retief, Magnan spluttered.\n \n \"We plan to use this planet for target practice,\" Retief said. \"A new type hell bomb we've worked out. Have all your people off of it in seventy-two hours, or suffer the consequences.\"\n \n \n\n IV\n \n \"You have the gall,\" Qorn stormed, \"to stand here in the center of Qornt Hall\u2014uninvited, at that\u2014and in chains\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, these,\" Retief said. He tensed his arms. The soft aluminum links stretched and broke. He shook the light metal free. \"We diplomats like to go along with colorful local customs, but I wouldn't want to mislead you. Now, as to the evacuation of Roolit I\u2014\"\n \n \n\n \n Zubb screeched, waved the guns. The Qornt were jabbering.\n \n \"I told you they were brutes,\" Zubb shrilled.\n \n Qorn slammed his fist down on the table. \"I don't care what they are!\" he honked. \"Evacuate, hell! I can field eighty-five combat-ready ships!\"\n \n \"And we can englobe every one of them with a thousand Peace Enforcers with a hundred megatons/second firepower each.\"\n \n \"Retief.\" Magnan tugged at his sleeve. \"Don't forget their superdrive.\"\n \n \"That's all right. They don't have one.\"\n \n \"But\u2014\"\n \n \"We'll take you on!\" Qorn French-horned. \"We're the Qorn! We glory in battle! We live in fame or go down in\u2014\"\n \n \"Hogwash,\" the flame-and-blue Qorn cut in. \"If it wasn't for you, Qorn, we could sit around and feast and brag and enjoy life without having to prove anything.\"\n \n \"Qorn, you seem to be the fire-brand here,\" Retief said. \"I think the rest of the boys would listen to reason\u2014\"\n \n \"Over my dead body!\"\n \n \"My idea exactly,\" Retief said. \"You claim you can lick any man in the house. Unwind yourself from your ribbons and step out here on the floor, and we'll see how good you are at backing up your conversation.\"\n \n \n\n \n Magnan hovered at Retief's side. \"Twelve feet tall,\" he moaned. \"And did you notice the size of those hands?\"\n \n Retief watched as Qorn's aides helped him out of his formal trappings.\n\"I wouldn't worry too much, Mr. Magnan. This is a light-Gee world. I doubt if old Qorn would weigh up at more than two-fifty standard pounds here.\"\n \n \"But that phenomenal reach\u2014\"\n \n \"I'll peck away at him at knee level. When he bends over to swat me, I'll get a crack at him.\"\n \n Across the cleared floor, Qorn shook off his helpers with a snort.\n \n \"Enough! Let me at the upstart!\"\n \n Retief moved out to meet him, watching the upraised backward-jointed arms. Qorn stalked forward, long lean legs bent, long horny feet clacking against the polished floor. The other aliens\u2014both servitors and bejeweled Qornt\u2014formed a wide circle, all eyes unwaveringly on the combatants.\n \n Qorn struck suddenly, a long arm flashing down in a vicious cut at Retief, who leaned aside, caught one lean shank below the knee. Qorn bent to haul Retief from his leg\u2014and staggered back as a haymaker took him just below the beak. A screech went up from the crowd as Retief leaped clear.\n \n Qorn hissed and charged. Retief whirled aside, then struck the alien's off-leg in a flying tackle. Qorn leaned, arms windmilling, crashed to the floor. Retief whirled, dived for the left arm, whipped it behind the narrow back, seized Qorn's neck in a stranglehold and threw his weight backward. Qorn fell on his back, his legs squatted out at an awkward angle. He squawked and beat his free arm on the floor, reaching in vain for Retief.\n \n Zubb stepped forward, pistols ready. Magnan stepped before him.\n \n \"Need I remind you, sir,\" he said icily, \"that this is an official diplomatic function? I can brook no interference from disinterested parties.\"\n \n Zubb hesitated. Magnan held out a hand. \"I must ask you to hand me your weapons, Zubb.\"\n \n \"Look here,\" Zubb began.\n \n \"I may lose my temper,\" Magnan hinted. Zubb lowered the guns, passed them to Magnan. He thrust them into his belt with a sour smile, turned back to watch the encounter.\n \n Retief had thrown a turn of violet silk around Qorn's left wrist, bound it to the alien's neck. Another wisp of stuff floated from Qorn's shoulder. Retief, still holding Qorn in an awkward sprawl, wrapped it around one outflung leg, trussed ankle and thigh together. Qorn flopped, hooting. At each movement, the constricting loop around his neck, jerked his head back, the green crest tossing wildly.\n \n \"If I were you, I'd relax,\" Retief said, rising and releasing his grip. Qorn got a leg under him; Retief kicked it. Qorn's chin hit the floor with a hollow clack. He wilted, an ungainly tangle of over-long limbs and gay silks.\n \n Retief turned to the watching crowd. \"Next?\" he called.\n \n The blue and flame Qornt stepped forward. \"Maybe this would be a good time to elect a new leader,\" he said. \"Now, my qualifications\u2014\"\n \n \"Sit down,\" Retief said loudly. He stepped to the head of the table, seated himself in Qorn's vacated chair. \"A couple of you finish trussing Qorn up for me.\"\n \n \"But we must select a leader!\"\n \n \"That won't be necessary, boys. I'm your new leader.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"As I see it,\" Retief said, dribbling cigar ashes into an empty wine glass, \"you Qornt like to be warriors, but you don't particularly like to fight.\"\n \n \"We don't mind a little fighting\u2014within reason. And, of course, as Qornt, we're expected to die in battle. But what I say is, why rush things?\"\n \n \"I have a suggestion,\" Magnan said. \"Why not turn the reins of government over to the Verpp? They seem a level-headed group.\"\n \n \"What good would that do? Qornt are Qornt. It seems there's always one among us who's a slave to instinct\u2014and, naturally, we have to follow him.\"\n \n \"Why?\"\n \n \"Because that's the way it's done.\"\n \n \"Why not do it another way?\" Magnan offered. \"Now, I'd like to suggest community singing\u2014\"\n \n \"If we gave up fighting, we might live too long. Then what would happen?\"\n \n \"Live too long?\" Magnan looked puzzled.\n \n \"When estivating time comes there'd be no burrows for us. Anyway, with the new Qornt stepping on our heels\u2014\"\n \n \"I've lost the thread,\" Magnan said. \"Who are the new Qornt?\"\n \n \"After estivating, the Verpp moult, and then they're Qornt, of course. The Gwil become Boog, the Boog become Rheuk, the Rheuk metamorphosize into Verpp\u2014\"\n \n \"You mean Slun and Zubb\u2014the mild-natured naturalists\u2014will become warmongers like Qorn?\"\n \n \"Very likely. 'The milder the Verpp, the wilder the Qorn,' as the old saying goes.\"\n \n \"What do Qornt turn into?\" Retief asked.\n \n \"Hmmmm. That's a good question. So far, none have survived Qornthood.\"\n \n \"Have you thought of forsaking your warlike ways?\" Magnan asked. \"What about taking up sheepherding and regular church attendance?\"\n \n \"Don't mistake me. We Qornt like a military life. It's great sport to sit around roaring fires and drink and tell lies and then go dashing off to enjoy a brisk affray and some leisurely looting afterward. But we prefer a nice numerical advantage. Not this business of tackling you Terrestrials over on Guzzum\u2014that was a mad notion. We had no idea what your strength was.\"\n \n \"But now that's all off, of course,\" Magnan chirped. \"Now that we've had diplomatic relations and all\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, by no means. The fleet lifts in thirty days. After all, we're Qornt; we have to satisfy our drive to action.\"\n \n \"But Mr. Retief is your leader now. He won't let you!\"\n \n \"Only a dead Qornt stays home when Attack day comes. And even if he orders us all to cut our own throats, there are still the other Centers\u2014all with their own leaders. No, gentlemen, the Invasion is definitely on.\"\n \n \"Why don't you go invade somebody else?\" Magnan suggested. \"I could name some very attractive prospects\u2014outside my sector, of course.\"\n \n \"Hold everything,\" Retief said. \"I think we've got the basis of a deal here....\"\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the plot of the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31555, "query_start_index": 31557, "query_end_index": 31597, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ambassador Nitworth appears in front of his staff to announce that the Qornt, a race that disappeared 200 years ago, has suddenly reappeared and is making demands. One of the most alarming facts about this assault is that the Qornt were able to appear on the planet without detection by any of the equipment the earth men use. \n\nWhen Magnan tries to sneak out of the meeting without an assignment, Nitworth sends him and Ratief to check out the Qornt in person. Within moments of their arrival at the site, a Qornt steps out of the bushes. Magnan immediately tries to escape, but another alien appears and the two Qornts stop him from running away. He is able to defend himself and knocks them both to the ground. \n\nThe aliens agree to take Magnan and Ratief to Qornt Hall to speak with Qorn, the leader. Once they reach the hall, the Qornt escorts pull out a couple of weapons and point them at Magnan. They want to tell Qorn that the two men have assaulted them and tried to kidnap them. Inside the meeting place, the wild-looking leader tells Ratief and Magnan that he has zero intention of negotiating a peace deal between the Qornts and the humans. Instead, he wants adventure and action. \n\nIt becomes clear that Qorn is forcing his men to go to war although some of them are not interested in the battle. Qorn argues that he is the ultimate leader, and it makes no difference if his subordinates agree with his decisions or not. \n\nRatief and Magnan were sent to the Qornts to negotiate the earth men's surrender, but Ratief completely changes the plan. He tells the leader that they want to deliver an ultimatum of their own. They will bomb the planet in a few days\u2019 time, regardless of whether the Qornts have left it or not. \n\nQorn insists that his troops are ready for war, but one of his subordinates cuts in to tell him that many of the other Qornts would prefer to feast and enjoy themselves without going to battle for no good reason. Ratief challenges Qorn to a fight, and he eventually gets the alien in a stranglehold. After Ratief wins, he claims himself leader of the Qornts. \n\nSeveral of the Qornts declare that they must go to war regardless of who their leader is. They were made for fighting even though they didn\u2019t like their past leader\u2019s decision to attack the earthmen. Magnan suggests that the group goes elsewhere to invade, and Ratief agrees.  \n\nAmbassador Nitworth shows up to save Ratief and Magnan, completely unaware that they have taken over the Qornts. The men explain to their boss that they have established the Foreign Brigade, and the Qornts will now work for them. They have been sent off on a far away mission. Ratief and Magnan also tell Nitworth that the Qornts never left the planet. They were hibernating underground for 200 years.\n"}
{"id": "63150_3", "pid": "63150_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SOUL EATERS\n \n\n By WILLIAM CONOVER\n \n \n Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet\u2014fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \" And so, my dear ,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \" I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets\u2014or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. \"\n \n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder\u2014limpid as a child's.\n \n The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude\u2014the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.\n \n Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.\n \n A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n \n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits\u2014it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla.\n \n Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote.\n \n His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly.\n \n Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there.\n \n \n\n \n Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him.\n \n The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n \n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit\u2014an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them.\n \n \"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger.\n \n Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again\u2014you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace.\n \n \"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!\"\n \n \n\n \n The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak:\n \n \"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know\u2014your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen\u2014has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed.\n \n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her\u2014a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n\"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself\u2014seem to have vanished.\"\n \n Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision.\n \n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast.\n \n \"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself\u2014and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n\"Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n \n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"\n \n He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle.\n \n \n\n \n They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.\n \n A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side.\n \n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.\n \n Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes.\n \n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again.\"\n \n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice.\n \n \"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull\u2014a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have\u2014aside from your recklessness\u2014and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space.\n \n To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew.\n \n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.\n \n And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n \n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n \n \"Prepare to board!\"\n \n Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself:\n \n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice.\n \n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"\n \n George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame.\n \n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey.\n \n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.\n \n Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic:\n \n \"Prepare to return!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.\n \n Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately.\n \n \n\n \n Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits.\n \n \"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement.\n \n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits.\n \n Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic\u2014could be nothing else.\n \n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n \n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.\n \n In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.\n \n But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was\u2014a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him.\n \n Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n \n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact.\n \n It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\n \n \n\n \n With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it.\n \n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap.\n \n \"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n \n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity.\n \n And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.\n \n \"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n \n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n \n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n \n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.\n \n \"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n \n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs.\n \n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n \n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?\"\n \n \"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n \n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P.\n \n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n \n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist.\n \n \"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n \n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing.\n \n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n \n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"\n \n \"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck!\n \n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll need all hands now.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n \n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n \n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n \n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.\n \n Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the Martian man attacking Dennis?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28276, "query_start_index": 28278, "query_end_index": 28347, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dennis was forced to fight back and exit his state of stagnation, caused by being grounded at work and left by fiancee. When he overcame the enemy, the least turned out to be a space pirate, bearing a prohibited weapon. That way Dennis stopped and imprisoned a criminal, who turned out to possess useful information about Koerber's present activities. This helpful action, together with Dennis' personal interest in success of the mission and his skills of a spacer, made the commander give Dennis a chance to redeem himself. For that reason Dennis was sent to search for Koerber and he set out for the adventure."}
{"id": "63150_3", "pid": "63150_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SOUL EATERS\n \n\n By WILLIAM CONOVER\n \n \n Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet\u2014fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \" And so, my dear ,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \" I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets\u2014or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. \"\n \n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder\u2014limpid as a child's.\n \n The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude\u2014the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.\n \n Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.\n \n A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n \n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits\u2014it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla.\n \n Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote.\n \n His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly.\n \n Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there.\n \n \n\n \n Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him.\n \n The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n \n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit\u2014an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them.\n \n \"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger.\n \n Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again\u2014you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace.\n \n \"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!\"\n \n \n\n \n The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak:\n \n \"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know\u2014your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen\u2014has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed.\n \n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her\u2014a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n\"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself\u2014seem to have vanished.\"\n \n Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision.\n \n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast.\n \n \"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself\u2014and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n\"Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n \n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"\n \n He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle.\n \n \n\n \n They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.\n \n A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side.\n \n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.\n \n Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes.\n \n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again.\"\n \n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice.\n \n \"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull\u2014a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have\u2014aside from your recklessness\u2014and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space.\n \n To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew.\n \n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.\n \n And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n \n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n \n \"Prepare to board!\"\n \n Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself:\n \n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice.\n \n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"\n \n George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame.\n \n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey.\n \n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.\n \n Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic:\n \n \"Prepare to return!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.\n \n Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately.\n \n \n\n \n Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits.\n \n \"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement.\n \n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits.\n \n Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic\u2014could be nothing else.\n \n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n \n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.\n \n In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.\n \n But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was\u2014a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him.\n \n Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n \n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact.\n \n It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\n \n \n\n \n With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it.\n \n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap.\n \n \"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n \n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity.\n \n And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.\n \n \"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n \n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n \n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n \n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.\n \n \"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n \n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs.\n \n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n \n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?\"\n \n \"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n \n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P.\n \n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n \n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist.\n \n \"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n \n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing.\n \n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n \n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"\n \n \"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck!\n \n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll need all hands now.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n \n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n \n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n \n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.\n \n Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the Martian man attacking Dennis?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28276, "query_start_index": 28278, "query_end_index": 28347, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Martian fails to successfully attack Dennis as he is able to maneuver out of the way to prevent a painful or deadly attack. The Martian is captured by the police and they tell Dennis that he had a forbidden weapon on him, an atomic disintegrator. That type of weapon is only found on space pirates or criminals. It turns out that the Martian was a member of a pirate crew, specifically Koerber\u2019s pirate crew. Dennis aiding the capture of this Martian is important because it puts him in a more favorable position with the commander of the I.S.P. "}
{"id": "63150_3", "pid": "63150_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SOUL EATERS\n \n\n By WILLIAM CONOVER\n \n \n Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet\u2014fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \" And so, my dear ,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \" I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets\u2014or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. \"\n \n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder\u2014limpid as a child's.\n \n The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude\u2014the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.\n \n Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.\n \n A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n \n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits\u2014it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla.\n \n Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote.\n \n His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly.\n \n Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there.\n \n \n\n \n Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him.\n \n The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n \n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit\u2014an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them.\n \n \"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger.\n \n Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again\u2014you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace.\n \n \"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!\"\n \n \n\n \n The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak:\n \n \"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know\u2014your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen\u2014has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed.\n \n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her\u2014a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n\"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself\u2014seem to have vanished.\"\n \n Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision.\n \n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast.\n \n \"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself\u2014and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n\"Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n \n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"\n \n He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle.\n \n \n\n \n They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.\n \n A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side.\n \n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.\n \n Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes.\n \n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again.\"\n \n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice.\n \n \"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull\u2014a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have\u2014aside from your recklessness\u2014and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space.\n \n To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew.\n \n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.\n \n And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n \n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n \n \"Prepare to board!\"\n \n Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself:\n \n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice.\n \n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"\n \n George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame.\n \n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey.\n \n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.\n \n Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic:\n \n \"Prepare to return!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.\n \n Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately.\n \n \n\n \n Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits.\n \n \"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement.\n \n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits.\n \n Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic\u2014could be nothing else.\n \n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n \n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.\n \n In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.\n \n But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was\u2014a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him.\n \n Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n \n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact.\n \n It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\n \n \n\n \n With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it.\n \n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap.\n \n \"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n \n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity.\n \n And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.\n \n \"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n \n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n \n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n \n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.\n \n \"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n \n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs.\n \n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n \n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?\"\n \n \"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n \n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P.\n \n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n \n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist.\n \n \"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n \n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing.\n \n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n \n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"\n \n \"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck!\n \n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll need all hands now.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n \n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n \n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n \n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.\n \n Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the Martian man attacking Dennis?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28276, "query_start_index": 28278, "query_end_index": 28347, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Though the Martian man who attacks Dennis seems random, it is later revealed by the Police Lieutenant that the Martian was in possession of an atomic-disintegrator, which is a forbidden weapon. This, in addition to the attack, leads them to suspect that the Martian man is part of Koerber's pirate team. Dennis had previously been grounded by the I.S.P, but his brawl with the Martian man gives him the opportunity to be back on the I.S.P's good side. The Police Lieutenant tells Dennis that if the Martian turned out to be one of Koerber's men, he would allow Dennis to take the credit for his capture, which ends up working."}
{"id": "63150_3", "pid": "63150_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SOUL EATERS\n \n\n By WILLIAM CONOVER\n \n \n Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet\u2014fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \" And so, my dear ,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \" I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets\u2014or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. \"\n \n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder\u2014limpid as a child's.\n \n The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude\u2014the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.\n \n Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.\n \n A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n \n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits\u2014it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla.\n \n Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote.\n \n His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly.\n \n Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there.\n \n \n\n \n Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him.\n \n The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n \n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit\u2014an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them.\n \n \"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger.\n \n Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again\u2014you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace.\n \n \"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!\"\n \n \n\n \n The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak:\n \n \"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know\u2014your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen\u2014has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed.\n \n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her\u2014a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n\"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself\u2014seem to have vanished.\"\n \n Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision.\n \n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast.\n \n \"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself\u2014and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n\"Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n \n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"\n \n He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle.\n \n \n\n \n They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.\n \n A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side.\n \n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.\n \n Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes.\n \n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again.\"\n \n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice.\n \n \"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull\u2014a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have\u2014aside from your recklessness\u2014and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space.\n \n To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew.\n \n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.\n \n And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n \n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n \n \"Prepare to board!\"\n \n Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself:\n \n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice.\n \n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"\n \n George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame.\n \n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey.\n \n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.\n \n Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic:\n \n \"Prepare to return!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.\n \n Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately.\n \n \n\n \n Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits.\n \n \"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement.\n \n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits.\n \n Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic\u2014could be nothing else.\n \n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n \n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.\n \n In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.\n \n But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was\u2014a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him.\n \n Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n \n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact.\n \n It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\n \n \n\n \n With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it.\n \n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap.\n \n \"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n \n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity.\n \n And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.\n \n \"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n \n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n \n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n \n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.\n \n \"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n \n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs.\n \n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n \n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?\"\n \n \"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n \n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P.\n \n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n \n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist.\n \n \"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n \n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing.\n \n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n \n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"\n \n \"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck!\n \n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll need all hands now.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n \n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n \n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n \n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.\n \n Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the importance of the Martian man attacking Dennis?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28276, "query_start_index": 28278, "query_end_index": 28347, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Martian man attacking Dennis reveals more critical information about Koerber, the criminal\u2019s whereabouts, and how Dennis later becomes involved. Even though Denis is temporarily not allowed to interact with the I.S.P., the Martian man attacking him creates an opportunity for him to go back to the organization. Furthermore, he is also aware of Marla\u2019s situation from going to I.S.P., and he goes immediately to hunt down Koerber. For the commander, this Martian\u2019s attack also means that the location of their lost passengers and cargo must be found soon. The attack sets up the plot for the majority of the story, and it also helps Dennis become motivated enough to go and rescue Marla. \n"}
{"id": "51687_5", "pid": "51687_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\n \n \n By DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n \n Illustrated by WEST\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent\u2014including my date with my girl!\n \n\n \n When the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency\u2014well, I won't go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put the roof on the city, as they say.\n \n It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n \n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it\u2014to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this morning\u2014right after the egg yolk\u2014and invited myself down to her place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.\n \n Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up.\n \n Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened\u2014I'd broken a shoe lace\u2014she refused to speak to me for four days.\n \n And then the elevator didn't come.\n \n \n\n \n Until then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg\u2014I couldn't very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry\u2014and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window\u2014one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag\u2014I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one.\n \n I had a Whimsical Approach: \"Honey, I see there's a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.\" And I had a Romantic Approach: \"Darling, I can't live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?\" I even had a Straightforward Approach: \"Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spend that time with than you.\"\n \n Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much less to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract for any kind of marriage other than Non-P\u2014Non-Permanent, No Progeny.\n \n So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment at five minutes to ten.\n \n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away. It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I was giving myself plenty of time.\n \n But then the elevator didn't come.\n \n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't understand it.\n \n The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n \n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n \n It didn't arrive.\n \n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to give her advance warning that I would be late?\n \n Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n \n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to keep us from being interrupted.\n \n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute late.\n \n No matter. It didn't arrive.\n \n I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n \n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\n \n \n\n \n It took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and\u2014\u2014\"\n \n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she were growing very used to saying it.\n \n It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean disconnected? Elevators don't get disconnected!\" I told her.\n \n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n \n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it, giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me why the elevator is disconnected?\"\n \n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that\u2014\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly at her screen and parroted her responses.\n \n But now she was actually looking at me .\n \n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have ruined my life.\"\n \n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n \n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you understand me?\"\n \n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too preoccupied to notice it at the time.\n \n \"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection, a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten o'clock. I'm late! \" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize what you've done , disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she marry me, she won't even speak to me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n \n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n \n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n \n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your\u2014\"\n \n \"You understand ?\" I trembled with speechless fury.\n \n She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen, revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out, sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is\u2014\" she leaned even closer to the screen\u2014\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n It was my turn to be stunned.\n \n I just gaped at her. \"A\u2014a what?\"\n \n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think of to get him out.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n \n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims the elevator at them.\"\n \n That sounded impossible. \"He aims the elevator?\"\n \n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush anybody who goes after him.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n \n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\"\n \n She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n\"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n \n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n \n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?\n \n Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present threat of other projects had never been more for me\u2014or for most other people either, I suspected\u2014than occasional ore-sleds that didn't return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr. Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.\n \n Dr. Kilbillie\u2014Intermediate Project History, when I was fifteen years old\u2014had private names for every major war of the twentieth century. There was the Ignoble Nobleman's War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, known to the textbooks of course as World Wars One, Two, and Three.\n \n The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of many many factors, but two of the most important were the population explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course, meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000, everybody lived in Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects\n(also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants, shopping centers, baby-sitting services, dry cleaners and a host of other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely self-sufficient, with food grown hydroponically in the sub-basements, separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot ore-sleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things, the population explosion.\n \n And the Treaty of Oslo.\n \n It seems there was a power-struggle between two sets of then-existing nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added that just in case anyone happened to think of it only tactical atomic weapons could be used. No strategic atomic weapons. (A tactical weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapons is something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody did think of the war, both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which meant that no Projects were bombed.\n \n Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected radioactive particles.\n \n However, what with all of the other treaties which were broken during the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to ask.\n \n And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it go at that.\n \n \n\n \n But now there was a spy in the elevator.\n \n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the other side of them.\n \n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n \n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen. I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient reason for me to be late.\n \n He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n \n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n \n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of stairs since I was twelve years old.\n \n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators, didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was the use of stairs?\n \n Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary information), the Project had been built when there still had been such things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n \n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n \n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could. If the door would open.\n \n It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing, took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n \n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with difficulty.\n \n I read them. They said:\n \n \n EMERGENCY ENTRANCE ELEVATOR SHAFT AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY KEEP LOCKED\n \n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already. Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n \n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and the spy came out, waving a gun.\n \n \n\n III\n \n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous, in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the elevator shaft.\n \n Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us open-mouthed and wide-eyed.\n \n Unfortunately, he recovered first.\n \n He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. \"Don't move!\" he whispered harshly. \"Don't make a sound!\"\n \n I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound. Which left me quite free to study him.\n \n He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he didn't look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents' apartment.\n \n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n \n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I said.\n \n \"Good,\" he said\u2014just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending boots. The Army!\n \n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He said, \"Where do you live?\"\n \n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man. I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to either escape or capture him.\n \n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.\n \n And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back, and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n \n I nodded.\n \n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n \n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n \n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile playing across his lips.\n \n I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n \n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n \n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got any chico coffee?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with boiling water.\"\n \n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n \n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\n \n \n\n \n And now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't ever going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n \n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n\"What do you do for a living?\"\n \n I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie, of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it.\n \n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati\u2014talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came.\n \n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the ore-sleds?\"\n \n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n \n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up? Don't you people ever test them?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n \n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them before de-radiating them?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"No. Why should we?\"\n \n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n \n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n \n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n \n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told him.\n \n \"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n \n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of course not!\"\n \n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n \n \"I have no idea,\" I told him.\n \n \"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion as he talked. \"Is this the natural life of man? It is not. Is this even a desirable life for man? It is definitely not.\" He spun back to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n\"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all the time. He was planning to tackle space ! The moon first, and then the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there, waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\n \n \n\n \n I decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy, he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded politely.\n \n \"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n\"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his tail between his legs. That's what he did!\"\n \n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n \n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy.\n \n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" I said.\n \n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n \n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I\u2014I wouldn't know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n \n \"Military equipment? What military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n \n \"The defenses\u2014\" I started.\n \n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None.\"\n \n \"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy.\n \n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n \n \"Well, of course.\"\n \n \"And what are they supposed to spy on?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects.\"\n \n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n \n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified information.\"\n \n \"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's what your spies are doing, and if I'm a spy, then it follows that I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n \n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n \n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n \n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n \n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's not my job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I were a spy, then that would be my job!\"\n \n \n\n \n The maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n\"All right, whatever you say.\"\n \n He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped back into the chair.\n \n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I had found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?\"\n \n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n \n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n \n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"\n \n \"Ah hah!\" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. \"Now, then,\" he said. \"If you know it doesn't make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think they might see some advantage in attacking you ?\"\n \n I shook my head, dumbfounded. \"I can't answer a question like that,\" I said. \"How do I know what they're thinking?\"\n \n \"They're human beings, aren't they?\" he cried. \"Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?\"\n \n \"Now, wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm not a spy, and I'm going to tell you what I am.\"\n \n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n \n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to protect me.\"\n \n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.\n \n \"The radiation level,\" he went on, \"is way down. It's practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.\" He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. \"The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects.\"\n \n And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.\n \n \"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Edmund Rice, and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30760, "query_start_index": 30762, "query_end_index": 30829, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edmund is eager to propose to his girlfriend. He truly loves her and would like a long marriage, but he is willing to settle for a Non-P marriage since he knows she values her freedom and independence. After gathering the courage to propose, he makes a date with her one morning, but multiple minor calamities make him run late. Linda is a stickler for punctuality, so on this morning, it is especially important to be on time. When he makes it to the elevator with five minutes to spare, his proposal is thwarted because a spy is holding it up. When he tries to call Linda to let her know he is running late, he can\u2019t get the call through because she has set her phone not to be disturbed. When he learns that a spy is holding up the elevator and might be in there until the Army can starve him out, he decides to brave the 208 stairs down to Linda\u2019s apartment, only to run into the spy there. The spy forces Edmund back to his apartment, where he explains he is not really a spy and that the radiation levels outside are so low it is safe for everyone to leave the projects. Edmund is sure the man is a lunatic despite the logic of his argument. He realizes that his chance to marry Linda is gone; she will never forgive him for being late."}
{"id": "51687_5", "pid": "51687_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\n \n \n By DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n \n Illustrated by WEST\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent\u2014including my date with my girl!\n \n\n \n When the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency\u2014well, I won't go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put the roof on the city, as they say.\n \n It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n \n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it\u2014to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this morning\u2014right after the egg yolk\u2014and invited myself down to her place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.\n \n Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up.\n \n Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened\u2014I'd broken a shoe lace\u2014she refused to speak to me for four days.\n \n And then the elevator didn't come.\n \n \n\n \n Until then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg\u2014I couldn't very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry\u2014and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window\u2014one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag\u2014I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one.\n \n I had a Whimsical Approach: \"Honey, I see there's a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.\" And I had a Romantic Approach: \"Darling, I can't live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?\" I even had a Straightforward Approach: \"Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spend that time with than you.\"\n \n Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much less to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract for any kind of marriage other than Non-P\u2014Non-Permanent, No Progeny.\n \n So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment at five minutes to ten.\n \n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away. It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I was giving myself plenty of time.\n \n But then the elevator didn't come.\n \n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't understand it.\n \n The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n \n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n \n It didn't arrive.\n \n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to give her advance warning that I would be late?\n \n Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n \n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to keep us from being interrupted.\n \n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute late.\n \n No matter. It didn't arrive.\n \n I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n \n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\n \n \n\n \n It took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and\u2014\u2014\"\n \n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she were growing very used to saying it.\n \n It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean disconnected? Elevators don't get disconnected!\" I told her.\n \n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n \n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it, giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me why the elevator is disconnected?\"\n \n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that\u2014\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly at her screen and parroted her responses.\n \n But now she was actually looking at me .\n \n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have ruined my life.\"\n \n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n \n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you understand me?\"\n \n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too preoccupied to notice it at the time.\n \n \"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection, a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten o'clock. I'm late! \" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize what you've done , disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she marry me, she won't even speak to me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n \n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n \n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n \n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your\u2014\"\n \n \"You understand ?\" I trembled with speechless fury.\n \n She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen, revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out, sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is\u2014\" she leaned even closer to the screen\u2014\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n It was my turn to be stunned.\n \n I just gaped at her. \"A\u2014a what?\"\n \n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think of to get him out.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n \n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims the elevator at them.\"\n \n That sounded impossible. \"He aims the elevator?\"\n \n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush anybody who goes after him.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n \n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\"\n \n She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n\"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n \n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n \n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?\n \n Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present threat of other projects had never been more for me\u2014or for most other people either, I suspected\u2014than occasional ore-sleds that didn't return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr. Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.\n \n Dr. Kilbillie\u2014Intermediate Project History, when I was fifteen years old\u2014had private names for every major war of the twentieth century. There was the Ignoble Nobleman's War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, known to the textbooks of course as World Wars One, Two, and Three.\n \n The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of many many factors, but two of the most important were the population explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course, meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000, everybody lived in Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects\n(also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants, shopping centers, baby-sitting services, dry cleaners and a host of other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely self-sufficient, with food grown hydroponically in the sub-basements, separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot ore-sleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things, the population explosion.\n \n And the Treaty of Oslo.\n \n It seems there was a power-struggle between two sets of then-existing nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added that just in case anyone happened to think of it only tactical atomic weapons could be used. No strategic atomic weapons. (A tactical weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapons is something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody did think of the war, both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which meant that no Projects were bombed.\n \n Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected radioactive particles.\n \n However, what with all of the other treaties which were broken during the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to ask.\n \n And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it go at that.\n \n \n\n \n But now there was a spy in the elevator.\n \n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the other side of them.\n \n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n \n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen. I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient reason for me to be late.\n \n He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n \n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n \n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of stairs since I was twelve years old.\n \n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators, didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was the use of stairs?\n \n Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary information), the Project had been built when there still had been such things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n \n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n \n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could. If the door would open.\n \n It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing, took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n \n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with difficulty.\n \n I read them. They said:\n \n \n EMERGENCY ENTRANCE ELEVATOR SHAFT AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY KEEP LOCKED\n \n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already. Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n \n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and the spy came out, waving a gun.\n \n \n\n III\n \n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous, in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the elevator shaft.\n \n Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us open-mouthed and wide-eyed.\n \n Unfortunately, he recovered first.\n \n He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. \"Don't move!\" he whispered harshly. \"Don't make a sound!\"\n \n I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound. Which left me quite free to study him.\n \n He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he didn't look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents' apartment.\n \n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n \n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I said.\n \n \"Good,\" he said\u2014just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending boots. The Army!\n \n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He said, \"Where do you live?\"\n \n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man. I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to either escape or capture him.\n \n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.\n \n And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back, and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n \n I nodded.\n \n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n \n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n \n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile playing across his lips.\n \n I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n \n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n \n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got any chico coffee?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with boiling water.\"\n \n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n \n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\n \n \n\n \n And now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't ever going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n \n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n\"What do you do for a living?\"\n \n I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie, of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it.\n \n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati\u2014talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came.\n \n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the ore-sleds?\"\n \n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n \n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up? Don't you people ever test them?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n \n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them before de-radiating them?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"No. Why should we?\"\n \n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n \n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n \n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n \n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told him.\n \n \"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n \n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of course not!\"\n \n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n \n \"I have no idea,\" I told him.\n \n \"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion as he talked. \"Is this the natural life of man? It is not. Is this even a desirable life for man? It is definitely not.\" He spun back to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n\"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all the time. He was planning to tackle space ! The moon first, and then the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there, waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\n \n \n\n \n I decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy, he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded politely.\n \n \"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n\"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his tail between his legs. That's what he did!\"\n \n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n \n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy.\n \n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" I said.\n \n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n \n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I\u2014I wouldn't know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n \n \"Military equipment? What military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n \n \"The defenses\u2014\" I started.\n \n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None.\"\n \n \"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy.\n \n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n \n \"Well, of course.\"\n \n \"And what are they supposed to spy on?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects.\"\n \n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n \n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified information.\"\n \n \"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's what your spies are doing, and if I'm a spy, then it follows that I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n \n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n \n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n \n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n \n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's not my job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I were a spy, then that would be my job!\"\n \n \n\n \n The maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n\"All right, whatever you say.\"\n \n He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped back into the chair.\n \n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I had found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?\"\n \n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n \n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n \n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"\n \n \"Ah hah!\" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. \"Now, then,\" he said. \"If you know it doesn't make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think they might see some advantage in attacking you ?\"\n \n I shook my head, dumbfounded. \"I can't answer a question like that,\" I said. \"How do I know what they're thinking?\"\n \n \"They're human beings, aren't they?\" he cried. \"Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?\"\n \n \"Now, wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm not a spy, and I'm going to tell you what I am.\"\n \n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n \n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to protect me.\"\n \n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.\n \n \"The radiation level,\" he went on, \"is way down. It's practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.\" He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. \"The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects.\"\n \n And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.\n \n \"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Edmund Rice, and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30760, "query_start_index": 30762, "query_end_index": 30829, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edmund Rice is a gymnast and martial arts instructor living on the 153rd floor of one of the many Projects. He is in love with Linda, an ore-sled dispatcher who lives a few floors down from him, and wants to ask her to marry him. After eating his egg, he prepares himself to propose to Linda, reviewing his three speeches. He leaves with a few minutes to spare, but the elevator won\u2019t work. He watches hopefully as time ticks by and finally accepts that he\u2019s going to be late. He dashes back to his apartment to call Linda and warn her of his tardiness, but she has disconnected her landline. He goes back to the elevator, but still nothing. He storms home and calls the Transit Staff, yelling at the woman who picks up. After he shares his sob story, she reveals that the elevator isn\u2019t working because there\u2019s a spy in it who\u2019s taken over the control system. Realizing just how late he is, Edmund runs back out, tries the elevator again, and then decides to take the stairs. On one of the landings, he notices a door with faint letters on it. This door connects to the elevator shaft. Suddenly, the spy bursts through the door and holds Edmund at gunpoint. Edmund hides him in his room and is forced to make the spy a cup of Chico coffee as he tells his tale. Edmund disguises his identity and pretends he\u2019s an ore-sled dispatcher like Linda, so, if the time should come, he can take the so-called spy by surprise. "}
{"id": "51687_5", "pid": "51687_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\n \n \n By DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n \n Illustrated by WEST\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent\u2014including my date with my girl!\n \n\n \n When the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency\u2014well, I won't go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put the roof on the city, as they say.\n \n It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n \n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it\u2014to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this morning\u2014right after the egg yolk\u2014and invited myself down to her place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.\n \n Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up.\n \n Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened\u2014I'd broken a shoe lace\u2014she refused to speak to me for four days.\n \n And then the elevator didn't come.\n \n \n\n \n Until then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg\u2014I couldn't very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry\u2014and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window\u2014one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag\u2014I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one.\n \n I had a Whimsical Approach: \"Honey, I see there's a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.\" And I had a Romantic Approach: \"Darling, I can't live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?\" I even had a Straightforward Approach: \"Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spend that time with than you.\"\n \n Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much less to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract for any kind of marriage other than Non-P\u2014Non-Permanent, No Progeny.\n \n So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment at five minutes to ten.\n \n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away. It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I was giving myself plenty of time.\n \n But then the elevator didn't come.\n \n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't understand it.\n \n The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n \n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n \n It didn't arrive.\n \n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to give her advance warning that I would be late?\n \n Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n \n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to keep us from being interrupted.\n \n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute late.\n \n No matter. It didn't arrive.\n \n I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n \n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\n \n \n\n \n It took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and\u2014\u2014\"\n \n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she were growing very used to saying it.\n \n It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean disconnected? Elevators don't get disconnected!\" I told her.\n \n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n \n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it, giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me why the elevator is disconnected?\"\n \n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that\u2014\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly at her screen and parroted her responses.\n \n But now she was actually looking at me .\n \n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have ruined my life.\"\n \n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n \n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you understand me?\"\n \n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too preoccupied to notice it at the time.\n \n \"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection, a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten o'clock. I'm late! \" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize what you've done , disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she marry me, she won't even speak to me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n \n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n \n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n \n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your\u2014\"\n \n \"You understand ?\" I trembled with speechless fury.\n \n She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen, revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out, sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is\u2014\" she leaned even closer to the screen\u2014\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n It was my turn to be stunned.\n \n I just gaped at her. \"A\u2014a what?\"\n \n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think of to get him out.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n \n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims the elevator at them.\"\n \n That sounded impossible. \"He aims the elevator?\"\n \n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush anybody who goes after him.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n \n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\"\n \n She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n\"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n \n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n \n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?\n \n Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present threat of other projects had never been more for me\u2014or for most other people either, I suspected\u2014than occasional ore-sleds that didn't return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr. Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.\n \n Dr. Kilbillie\u2014Intermediate Project History, when I was fifteen years old\u2014had private names for every major war of the twentieth century. There was the Ignoble Nobleman's War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, known to the textbooks of course as World Wars One, Two, and Three.\n \n The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of many many factors, but two of the most important were the population explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course, meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000, everybody lived in Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects\n(also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants, shopping centers, baby-sitting services, dry cleaners and a host of other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely self-sufficient, with food grown hydroponically in the sub-basements, separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot ore-sleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things, the population explosion.\n \n And the Treaty of Oslo.\n \n It seems there was a power-struggle between two sets of then-existing nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added that just in case anyone happened to think of it only tactical atomic weapons could be used. No strategic atomic weapons. (A tactical weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapons is something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody did think of the war, both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which meant that no Projects were bombed.\n \n Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected radioactive particles.\n \n However, what with all of the other treaties which were broken during the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to ask.\n \n And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it go at that.\n \n \n\n \n But now there was a spy in the elevator.\n \n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the other side of them.\n \n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n \n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen. I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient reason for me to be late.\n \n He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n \n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n \n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of stairs since I was twelve years old.\n \n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators, didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was the use of stairs?\n \n Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary information), the Project had been built when there still had been such things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n \n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n \n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could. If the door would open.\n \n It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing, took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n \n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with difficulty.\n \n I read them. They said:\n \n \n EMERGENCY ENTRANCE ELEVATOR SHAFT AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY KEEP LOCKED\n \n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already. Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n \n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and the spy came out, waving a gun.\n \n \n\n III\n \n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous, in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the elevator shaft.\n \n Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us open-mouthed and wide-eyed.\n \n Unfortunately, he recovered first.\n \n He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. \"Don't move!\" he whispered harshly. \"Don't make a sound!\"\n \n I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound. Which left me quite free to study him.\n \n He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he didn't look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents' apartment.\n \n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n \n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I said.\n \n \"Good,\" he said\u2014just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending boots. The Army!\n \n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He said, \"Where do you live?\"\n \n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man. I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to either escape or capture him.\n \n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.\n \n And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back, and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n \n I nodded.\n \n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n \n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n \n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile playing across his lips.\n \n I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n \n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n \n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got any chico coffee?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with boiling water.\"\n \n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n \n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\n \n \n\n \n And now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't ever going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n \n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n\"What do you do for a living?\"\n \n I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie, of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it.\n \n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati\u2014talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came.\n \n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the ore-sleds?\"\n \n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n \n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up? Don't you people ever test them?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n \n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them before de-radiating them?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"No. Why should we?\"\n \n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n \n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n \n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n \n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told him.\n \n \"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n \n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of course not!\"\n \n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n \n \"I have no idea,\" I told him.\n \n \"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion as he talked. \"Is this the natural life of man? It is not. Is this even a desirable life for man? It is definitely not.\" He spun back to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n\"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all the time. He was planning to tackle space ! The moon first, and then the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there, waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\n \n \n\n \n I decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy, he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded politely.\n \n \"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n\"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his tail between his legs. That's what he did!\"\n \n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n \n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy.\n \n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" I said.\n \n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n \n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I\u2014I wouldn't know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n \n \"Military equipment? What military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n \n \"The defenses\u2014\" I started.\n \n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None.\"\n \n \"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy.\n \n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n \n \"Well, of course.\"\n \n \"And what are they supposed to spy on?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects.\"\n \n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n \n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified information.\"\n \n \"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's what your spies are doing, and if I'm a spy, then it follows that I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n \n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n \n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n \n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n \n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's not my job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I were a spy, then that would be my job!\"\n \n \n\n \n The maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n\"All right, whatever you say.\"\n \n He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped back into the chair.\n \n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I had found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?\"\n \n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n \n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n \n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"\n \n \"Ah hah!\" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. \"Now, then,\" he said. \"If you know it doesn't make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think they might see some advantage in attacking you ?\"\n \n I shook my head, dumbfounded. \"I can't answer a question like that,\" I said. \"How do I know what they're thinking?\"\n \n \"They're human beings, aren't they?\" he cried. \"Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?\"\n \n \"Now, wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm not a spy, and I'm going to tell you what I am.\"\n \n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n \n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to protect me.\"\n \n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.\n \n \"The radiation level,\" he went on, \"is way down. It's practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.\" He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. \"The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects.\"\n \n And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.\n \n \"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Edmund Rice, and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30760, "query_start_index": 30762, "query_end_index": 30829, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edmund Rice is a gymnast instructor specializing in wrestling, judo, and karati. He lives on the 153rd floor of a Project high-rise building and is preparing to propose to his girlfriend, Linda. Although he loves Linda and wants more than a Non-Permanent, No Progeny arrangement, he realizes she values her independence and plans to respect that. He has found a suitable Non-P apartment for them to share. Edmund's day is not going right. The egg yolk breaks when he prepares breakfast, his zipper sticks, the window is stuck open at full transparency. All of these minor problems are enhanced because he knows if he is even a minute late to his appointment with Linda, she will possibly think he is dead. Edmund gives himself plenty of time to get to the elevator, even though he knows the local and express elevators have a thirty-second arrival time, and it takes less than two minutes to get down to Linda's floor in the same building. When the elevator fails to arrive, Edmund panics. He tries to call Linda, but she has set the phone to private in anticipation of his proposal. Then, he calls the Transit Staff who tells him that the elevator is occupied by a spy, who has barricaded himself inside and is using the elevator as a projectile against anyone who might try to get him out. When Edmund tries to take the stairs to get to Linda, the spy stops him and leads him back to his apartment. Edmund attempts to mislead the spy by pretending to be an ore-sled dispatcher, but this only leads to the spy launching into a long diatribe against the existence of the Projects as smokescreens for the Commission wanting to maintain profits."}
{"id": "51687_5", "pid": "51687_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SPY IN THE ELEVATOR\n \n \n By DONALD E. WESTLAKE\n \n Illustrated by WEST\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Magazine October 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n He was dangerously insane. He threatened to destroy everything that was noble and decent\u2014including my date with my girl!\n \n\n \n When the elevator didn't come, that just made the day perfect. A broken egg yolk, a stuck zipper, a feedback in the aircon exhaust, the window sticking at full transparency\u2014well, I won't go through the whole sorry list. Suffice it to say that when the elevator didn't come, that put the roof on the city, as they say.\n \n It was just one of those days. Everybody gets them. Days when you're lucky in you make it to nightfall with no bones broken.\n \n But of all times for it to happen! For literally months I'd been building my courage up. And finally, just today, I had made up my mind to do it\u2014to propose to Linda. I'd called her second thing this morning\u2014right after the egg yolk\u2014and invited myself down to her place. \"Ten o'clock,\" she'd said, smiling sweetly at me out of the phone. She knew why I wanted to talk to her. And when Linda said ten o'clock, she meant ten o'clock.\n \n Don't get me wrong. I don't mean that Linda's a perfectionist or a harridan or anything like that. Far from it. But she does have a fixation on that one subject of punctuality. The result of her job, of course. She was an ore-sled dispatcher. Ore-sleds, being robots, were invariably punctual. If an ore-sled didn't return on time, no one waited for it. They simply knew that it had been captured by some other Project and had blown itself up.\n \n Well, of course, after working as an ore-sled dispatcher for three years, Linda quite naturally was a bit obsessed. I remember one time, shortly after we'd started dating, when I arrived at her place five minutes late and found her having hysterics. She thought I'd been killed. She couldn't visualize anything less than that keeping me from arriving at the designated moment. When I told her what actually had happened\u2014I'd broken a shoe lace\u2014she refused to speak to me for four days.\n \n And then the elevator didn't come.\n \n \n\n \n Until then, I'd managed somehow to keep the day's minor disasters from ruining my mood. Even while eating that horrible egg\u2014I couldn't very well throw it away, broken yolk or no; it was my breakfast allotment and I was hungry\u2014and while hurriedly jury-rigging drapery across that gaspingly transparent window\u2014one hundred and fifty-three stories straight down to slag\u2014I kept going over and over my prepared proposal speeches, trying to select the most effective one.\n \n I had a Whimsical Approach: \"Honey, I see there's a nice little Non-P apartment available up on one seventy-three.\" And I had a Romantic Approach: \"Darling, I can't live without you at the moment. Temporarily, I'm madly in love with you. I want to share my life with you for a while. Will you be provisionally mine?\" I even had a Straightforward Approach: \"Linda, I'm going to be needing a wife for at least a year or two, and I can't think of anyone I would rather spend that time with than you.\"\n \n Actually, though I wouldn't even have admitted this to Linda, much less to anyone else, I loved her in more than a Non-P way. But even if we both had been genetically desirable (neither of us were) I knew that Linda relished her freedom and independence too much to ever contract for any kind of marriage other than Non-P\u2014Non-Permanent, No Progeny.\n \n So I rehearsed my various approaches, realizing that when the time came I would probably be so tongue-tied I'd be capable of no more than a blurted, \"Will you marry me?\" and I struggled with zippers and malfunctioning air-cons, and I managed somehow to leave the apartment at five minutes to ten.\n \n Linda lived down on the hundred fortieth floor, thirteen stories away. It never took more than two or three minutes to get to her place, so I was giving myself plenty of time.\n \n But then the elevator didn't come.\n \n I pushed the button, waited, and nothing happened. I couldn't understand it.\n \n The elevator had always arrived before, within thirty seconds of the button being pushed. This was a local stop, with an elevator that traveled between the hundred thirty-third floor and the hundred sixty-seventh floor, where it was possible to make connections for either the next local or for the express. So it couldn't be more than twenty stories away. And this was a non-rush hour.\n \n I pushed the button again, and then I waited some more. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes to ten. Two minutes, and no elevator! If it didn't arrive this instant, this second, I would be late.\n \n It didn't arrive.\n \n I vacillated, not knowing what to do next. Stay, hoping the elevator would come after all? Or hurry back to the apartment and call Linda, to give her advance warning that I would be late?\n \n Ten more seconds, and still no elevator. I chose the second alternative, raced back down the hall, and thumbed my way into my apartment. I dialed Linda's number, and the screen lit up with white letters on black: PRIVACY DISCONNECTION.\n \n Of course! Linda expected me at any moment. And she knew what I wanted to say to her, so quite naturally she had disconnected the phone, to keep us from being interrupted.\n \n Frantic, I dashed from the apartment again, back down the hall to the elevator, and leaned on that blasted button with all my weight. Even if the elevator should arrive right now, I would still be almost a minute late.\n \n No matter. It didn't arrive.\n \n I would have been in a howling rage anyway, but this impossibility piled on top of all the other annoyances and breakdowns of the day was just too much. I went into a frenzy, and kicked the elevator door three times before I realized I was hurting myself more than I was hurting the door. I limped back to the apartment, fuming, slammed the door behind me, grabbed the phone book and looked up the number of the Transit Staff. I dialed, prepared to register a complaint so loud they'd be able to hear me in sub-basement three.\n \n I got some more letters that spelled: BUSY.\n \n \n\n \n It took three tries before I got through to a hurried-looking female receptionist \"My name is Rice!\" I bellowed. \"Edmund Rice! I live on the hundred and fifty-third floor! I just rang for the elevator and\u2014\u2014\"\n \n \"The-elevator-is-disconnected.\" She said it very rapidly, as though she were growing very used to saying it.\n \n It only stopped me for a second. \"Disconnected? What do you mean disconnected? Elevators don't get disconnected!\" I told her.\n \n \"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible,\" she rattled. My bellowing was bouncing off her like radiation off the Project force-screen.\n \n I changed tactics. First I inhaled, making a production out of it, giving myself a chance to calm down a bit. And then I asked, as rationally as you could please, \"Would you mind terribly telling me why the elevator is disconnected?\"\n \n \"I-am-sorry-sir-but-that\u2014\u2014\"\n \n \"Stop,\" I said. I said it quietly, too, but she stopped. I saw her looking at me. She hadn't done that before, she'd merely gazed blankly at her screen and parroted her responses.\n \n But now she was actually looking at me .\n \n I took advantage of the fact. Calmly, rationally, I said to her, \"I would like to tell you something, Miss. I would like to tell you just what you people have done to me by disconnecting the elevator. You have ruined my life.\"\n \n She blinked, open-mouthed. \"Ruined your life?\"\n \n \"Precisely.\" I found it necessary to inhale again, even more slowly than before. \"I was on my way,\" I explained, \"to propose to a girl whom I dearly love. In every way but one, she is the perfect woman. Do you understand me?\"\n \n She nodded, wide-eyed. I had stumbled on a romantic, though I was too preoccupied to notice it at the time.\n \n \"In every way but one,\" I continued. \"She has one small imperfection, a fixation about punctuality. And I was supposed to meet her at ten o'clock. I'm late! \" I shook my fist at the screen. \"Do you realize what you've done , disconnecting the elevator? Not only won't she marry me, she won't even speak to me! Not now! Not after this!\"\n \n \"Sir,\" she said tremulously, \"please don't shout.\"\n \n \"I'm not shouting!\"\n \n \"Sir, I'm terribly sorry. I understand your\u2014\"\n \n \"You understand ?\" I trembled with speechless fury.\n \n She looked all about her, and then leaned closer to the screen, revealing a cleavage that I was too distraught at the moment to pay any attention to. \"We're not supposed to give this information out, sir,\" she said, her voice low, \"but I'm going to tell you, so you'll understand why we had to do it. I think it's perfectly awful that it had to ruin things for you this way. But the fact of the matter is\u2014\" she leaned even closer to the screen\u2014\"there's a spy in the elevator.\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n It was my turn to be stunned.\n \n I just gaped at her. \"A\u2014a what?\"\n \n \"A spy. He was discovered on the hundred forty-seventh floor, and managed to get into the elevator before the Army could catch him. He jammed it between floors. But the Army is doing everything it can think of to get him out.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014but why should there be any problem about getting him out?\"\n \n \"He plugged in the manual controls. We can't control the elevator from outside at all. And when anyone tries to get into the shaft, he aims the elevator at them.\"\n \n That sounded impossible. \"He aims the elevator?\"\n \n \"He runs it up and down the shaft,\" she explained, \"trying to crush anybody who goes after him.\"\n \n \"Oh,\" I said. \"So it might take a while.\"\n \n She leaned so close this time that even I, distracted as I was, could hardly help but take note of her cleavage. She whispered, \"They're afraid they'll have to starve him out.\"\n \n \"Oh, no!\"\n \n She nodded solemnly. \"I'm terribly sorry, sir,\" she said. Then she glanced to her right, suddenly straightened up again, and said,\n\"We-will-resume-service-as-soon-as-possible.\" Click. Blank screen.\n \n For a minute or two, all I could do was sit and absorb what I'd been told. A spy in the elevator! A spy who had managed to work his way all the way up to the hundred forty-seventh floor before being unmasked!\n \n What in the world was the matter with the Army? If things were getting that lax, the Project was doomed, force-screen or no. Who knew how many more spies there were in the Project, still unsuspected?\n \n Until that moment, the state of siege in which we all lived had had no reality for me. The Project, after all, was self-sufficient and completely enclosed. No one ever left, no one ever entered. Under our roof, we were a nation, two hundred stories high. The ever-present threat of other projects had never been more for me\u2014or for most other people either, I suspected\u2014than occasional ore-sleds that didn't return, occasional spies shot down as they tried to sneak into the building, occasional spies of our own leaving the Project in tiny radiation-proof cars, hoping to get safely within another project and bring back news of any immediate threats and dangers that project might be planning for us. Most spies didn't return; most ore-sleds did. And within the Project life was full, the knowledge of external dangers merely lurking at the backs of our minds. After all, those external dangers had been no more than potential for decades, since what Dr. Kilbillie called the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War.\n \n Dr. Kilbillie\u2014Intermediate Project History, when I was fifteen years old\u2014had private names for every major war of the twentieth century. There was the Ignoble Nobleman's War, the Racial Non-Racial War, and the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, known to the textbooks of course as World Wars One, Two, and Three.\n \n The rise of the Projects, according to Dr. Kilbillie, was the result of many many factors, but two of the most important were the population explosion and the Treaty of Oslo. The population explosion, of course, meant that there was continuously more and more people but never any more space. So that housing, in the historically short time of one century, made a complete transformation from horizontal expansion to vertical. Before 1900, the vast majority of human beings lived in tiny huts of from one to five stories. By 2000, everybody lived in Projects. From the very beginning, small attempts were made to make these Projects more than dwelling places. By mid-century, Projects\n(also called apartments and co-ops) already included restaurants, shopping centers, baby-sitting services, dry cleaners and a host of other adjuncts. By the end of the century, the Projects were completely self-sufficient, with food grown hydroponically in the sub-basements, separate floors set aside for schools and churches and factories, robot ore-sleds capable of seeking out raw materials unavailable within the Projects themselves and so on. And all because of, among other things, the population explosion.\n \n And the Treaty of Oslo.\n \n It seems there was a power-struggle between two sets of then-existing nations (they were something like Projects, only horizontal instead of vertical) and both sets were equipped with atomic weapons. The Treaty of Oslo began by stating that atomic war was unthinkable, and added that just in case anyone happened to think of it only tactical atomic weapons could be used. No strategic atomic weapons. (A tactical weapon is something you use on the soldiers, and a strategic weapons is something you use on the folks at home.) Oddly enough, when somebody did think of the war, both sides adhered to the Treaty of Oslo, which meant that no Projects were bombed.\n \n Of course, they made up for this as best they could by using tactical atomic weapons all over the place. After the war almost the whole world was quite dangerously radioactive. Except for the Projects. Or at least those of them which had in time installed the force screens which had been invented on the very eve of battle, and which deflected radioactive particles.\n \n However, what with all of the other treaties which were broken during the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War, by the time it was finished nobody was quite sure any more who was on whose side. That project over there on the horizon might be an ally. And then again it might not. Since they weren't sure either, it was risky to expose yourself in order to ask.\n \n And so life went on, with little to remind us of the dangers lurking Outside. The basic policy of Eternal Vigilance and Instant Preparedness was left to the Army. The rest of us simply lived our lives and let it go at that.\n \n \n\n \n But now there was a spy in the elevator.\n \n When I thought of how deeply he had penetrated our defenses, and of how many others there might be, still penetrating, I shuddered. The walls were our safeguards only so long as all potential enemies were on the other side of them.\n \n I sat shaken, digesting this news, until suddenly I remembered Linda.\n \n I leaped to my feet, reading from my watch that it was now ten-fifteen. I dashed once more from the apartment and down the hall to the elevator, praying that the spy had been captured by now and that Linda would agree with me that a spy in the elevator was good and sufficient reason for me to be late.\n \n He was still there. At least, the elevator was still out.\n \n I sagged against the wall, thinking dismal thoughts. Then I noticed the door to the right of the elevator. Through that door was the stairway.\n \n I hadn't paid any attention to it before. No one ever uses the stairs except adventurous young boys playing cops and robbers, running up and down from landing to landing. I myself hadn't set foot on a flight of stairs since I was twelve years old.\n \n Actually, the whole idea of stairs was ridiculous. We had elevators, didn't we? Usually, I mean, when they didn't contain spies. So what was the use of stairs?\n \n Well, according to Dr. Kilbillie (a walking library of unnecessary information), the Project had been built when there still had been such things as municipal governments (something to do with cities, which were more or less grouped Projects), and the local municipal government had had on its books a fire ordinance, anachronistic even then, which required a complete set of stairs in every building constructed in the city. Ergo, the Project had stairs, thirty-two hundred of them.\n \n And now, after all these years, the stairs might prove useful after all. It was only thirteen flights to Linda's floor. At sixteen steps a flight, that meant two hundred and eight steps.\n \n Could I descend two hundred and eight steps for my true love? I could. If the door would open.\n \n It would, though reluctantly. Who knew how many years it had been since last this door had been opened? It squeaked and wailed and groaned and finally opened half way. I stepped through to the musty, dusty landing, took a deep breath, and started down. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor. Eight steps and a landing, eight steps and a floor.\n \n On the landing between one fifty and one forty-nine, there was a smallish door. I paused, looking curiously at it, and saw that at one time letters had been painted on it. The letters had long since flaked away, but they left a lighter residue of dust than that which covered the rest of the door. And so the words could still be read, if with difficulty.\n \n I read them. They said:\n \n \n EMERGENCY ENTRANCE ELEVATOR SHAFT AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY KEEP LOCKED\n \n I frowned, wondering immediately why this door wasn't being firmly guarded by at least a platoon of Army men. Half a dozen possible answers flashed through my mind. The more recent maps might simply have omitted this discarded and unnecessary door. It might be sealed shut on the other side. The Army might have caught the spy already. Somebody in authority might simply have goofed.\n \n As I stood there, pondering these possibilities, the door opened and the spy came out, waving a gun.\n \n \n\n III\n \n He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous, in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the elevator shaft.\n \n Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us open-mouthed and wide-eyed.\n \n Unfortunately, he recovered first.\n \n He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. \"Don't move!\" he whispered harshly. \"Don't make a sound!\"\n \n I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound. Which left me quite free to study him.\n \n He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he didn't look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents' apartment.\n \n His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand at the descending stairs and whispered, \"Where do they go?\"\n \n I had to clear my throat before I could speak. \"All the way down,\" I said.\n \n \"Good,\" he said\u2014just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending boots. The Army!\n \n But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He said, \"Where do you live?\"\n \n \"One fifty-three,\" I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man. I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to either escape or capture him.\n \n \"All right,\" he whispered. \"Go on.\" He prodded me with the gun.\n \n And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back, and grated in my ear, \"I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're friends, just strolling along together. You got that?\"\n \n I nodded.\n \n \"All right. Let's go.\"\n \n We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I thumbed the door open and we went inside.\n \n Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile playing across his lips.\n \n I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He said, \"Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any silly heroics, nothing will happen to you.\"\n \n \"You'll never get away,\" I told him. \"The whole Project is alerted.\"\n \n \"You let me worry about that,\" he said. He licked his lips. \"You got any chico coffee?\"\n \n \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with boiling water.\"\n \n \"I only have my day's allotment,\" I protested. \"Just enough for two cups, lunch and dinner.\"\n \n \"Two cups is fine,\" he said. \"One for each of us.\"\n \n \n\n \n And now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't ever going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.\n \n As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then,\n\"What do you do for a living?\"\n \n I thought fast. \"I'm an ore-sled dispatcher,\" I said. That was a lie, of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it.\n \n Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati\u2014talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came.\n \n He was quiet for a moment. \"What about radiation level on the ore-sleds?\"\n \n I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.\n \n \"When they come back,\" he said. \"How much radiation do they pick up? Don't you people ever test them?\"\n \n \"Of course not,\" I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's information to guide me. \"All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they're brought into the building.\"\n \n \"I know that,\" he said impatiently. \"But don't you ever check them before de-radiating them?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"No. Why should we?\"\n \n \"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped.\"\n \n \"For what? Who cares about that?\"\n \n He frowned bitterly. \"The same answer,\" he muttered, more to himself than to me. \"The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever.\"\n \n I looked around at my apartment. \"Rather a well-appointed cave,\" I told him.\n \n \"But a cave nevertheless.\" He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. \"Don't you ever wish to get Outside?\"\n \n Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. \"Outside? Of course not!\"\n \n \"The same thing,\" he grumbled, \"over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?\"\n \n \"I have no idea,\" I told him.\n \n \"I'll tell you this,\" he said belligerently. \"A lot longer than it took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again.\" He started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion as he talked. \"Is this the natural life of man? It is not. Is this even a desirable life for man? It is definitely not.\" He spun back to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed it as though it were a finger, not a gun. \"Listen, you,\" he snapped.\n\"Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all the time. He was planning to tackle space ! The moon first, and then the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there, waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching out for it.\" He glared as though daring me to doubt it.\n \n \n\n \n I decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy, he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded politely.\n \n \"So what happened?\" he demanded, and immediately answered himself.\n\"I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his tail between his legs. That's what he did!\"\n \n To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by saying, \"Here's your coffee.\"\n \n \"Put it on the table,\" he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy.\n \n I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, \"What did they tell you I was? A spy?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" I said.\n \n He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. \"Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?\"\n \n He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. \"I\u2014I wouldn't know, exactly,\" I stammered. \"Military equipment, I suppose.\"\n \n \"Military equipment? What military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it.\"\n \n \"The defenses\u2014\" I started.\n \n \"The defenses,\" he interrupted me, \"are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None.\"\n \n \"If you say so,\" I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy.\n \n \"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?\" he demanded.\n \n \"Well, of course.\"\n \n \"And what are they supposed to spy on?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014\" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. \"They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects.\"\n \n \"And do they find any indications, ever?\"\n \n \"I'm sure I don't know,\" I told him frostily. \"That would be classified information.\"\n \n \"You bet it would,\" he said, with malicious glee. \"All right, if that's what your spies are doing, and if I'm a spy, then it follows that I'm doing the same thing, right?\"\n \n \"I don't follow you,\" I admitted.\n \n \"If I'm a spy,\" he said impatiently, \"then I'm supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project.\"\n \n I shrugged. \"If that's your job,\" I said, \"then that's your job.\"\n \n He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. \"That's not my job, you blatant idiot!\" he shouted. \"I'm not a spy! If I were a spy, then that would be my job!\"\n \n \n\n \n The maniac had returned, in full force. \"All right,\" I said hastily.\n\"All right, whatever you say.\"\n \n He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, \"Bah!\" and dropped back into the chair.\n \n He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. \"All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I had found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?\"\n \n I stared at him. \"That's impossible!\" I cried. \"We aren't planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!\"\n \n \"How do I know that?\" he demanded.\n \n \"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?\"\n \n \"Ah hah!\" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. \"Now, then,\" he said. \"If you know it doesn't make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think they might see some advantage in attacking you ?\"\n \n I shook my head, dumbfounded. \"I can't answer a question like that,\" I said. \"How do I know what they're thinking?\"\n \n \"They're human beings, aren't they?\" he cried. \"Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?\"\n \n \"Now, wait a minute\u2014\"\n \n \"No!\" he shouted. \"You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm not a spy, and I'm going to tell you what I am.\"\n \n I waited, looking as attentive as possible.\n \n \"I come,\" he said, \"from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to protect me.\"\n \n The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.\n \n \"The radiation level,\" he went on, \"is way down. It's practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least.\" He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. \"The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects.\"\n \n And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.\n \n \"I'm a trained atomic engineer,\" he went on. \"In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Edmund Rice, and what happens to him in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30760, "query_start_index": 30762, "query_end_index": 30829, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Edmund Rice is the narrating voice of the story, and so the events that occur to him in the story closely mirror the plot since it is all told from his perspective. Edmund is a gymnast instructor, skilled in wrestling, judo and karati. He lives on the 153rd floor of a self-sufficient vertical city building in which no one is supposed to enter or leave. There are many like it in the world, all called \u201cProjects\u201d. The world outside is said to be too dangerous to set foot in for humans because of the radiation from atomic bombs during the Ungentlemanly Gentleman's War. \nHe is deeply in love with an ore-sled dispatcher on the 144th floor, Linda, and wants to propose a Non-P marriage to her (Non-Permanent, No Progeny). Neither of them are genetically desirable enough to have children, and he knows that Linda likes her independence too much to have a permanent marriage, even though he would like to have one with her. He makes an appointment to meet with her at ten o\u2019clock and propose. The time of the appointment is important because Linda is so critical of punctuality that Edmund thinks she will not marry him or even talk to him again if he is late. When he exits his apartment to take the elevator at five minutes before ten, the elevator is not working. He returns to his apartment to call Linda, but she does not answer. He assumes she shut off her phone because he would be there soon and she wanted to have no interruptions. Edmund calls the Transit Staff to file a complaint that they have ruined his life, and the woman at the Transit center says there is a spy in the elevator and it will be some time before it can be fixed because the Army thinks they may have to starve him out. Edmund is crestfallen, then realizes that there are also stairs. It is 10:15, but he rushes to the staircase to try to get to Linda. As he races down, he notices a door to the elevator shaft between the 150th and 149th floors. He pauses to contemplate it, and suddenly a man (the \u201cspy\u201d) bursts out. He threatens Edmund with a gun, forcing him to escort them both back to Edmund\u2019s 153rd floor room without alerting anyone. He does this. Edmund is forced to make him a cup of coffee, taking one of his two coffee rations for the day. Edmund fears that the spy is a maniac, and does as he asks while they wait for the Army to lose the trail so the spy will leave. The spy reveals to Edmund that he is actually an atomic engineer testing his theory that it is now safe for humans to go outside the Projects by risking his life since the Commission would not let him run experiments on it. Edmund is stunned since this is contrary to what he has been conditioned to believe. \n"}
{"id": "51274_3", "pid": "51274_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAMBITION\n \n \n By WILLIAM L. BADE\n \n Illustrated by L. WOROMAY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n To the men of the future, the scientific goals of today were as incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail!\n \n \n \n There was a thump. Maitland stirred, came half awake, and opened his eyes. The room was dark except where a broad shaft of moonlight from the open window fell on the foot of his bed. Outside, the residential section of the Reservation slept silently under the pale illumination of the full Moon. He guessed sleepily that it was about three o'clock.\n \n What had he heard? He had a definite impression that the sound had come from within the room. It had sounded like someone stumbling into a chair, or\u2014\n \n Something moved in the darkness on the other side of the room. Maitland started to sit up and it was as though a thousand volts had shorted his brain....\n \n This time, he awoke more normally. He opened his eyes, looked through the window at a section of azure sky, listened to the singing of birds somewhere outside. A beautiful day. In the middle of the process of stretching his rested muscles, arms extended back, legs tensed, he froze, looking up\u2014for the first time really seeing the ceiling. He turned his head, then rolled off the bed, wide awake.\n  This wasn't his room!\n \n \n The lawn outside wasn't part of the Reservation! Where the labs and the shops should have been, there was deep prairie grass, then a green ocean pushed into waves by the breeze stretching to the horizon. This wasn't the California desert! Down the hill, where the liquid oxygen plant ought to have been, a river wound across the scene, almost hidden beneath its leafy roof of huge ancient trees.\n \n Shock contracted Maitland's diaphragm and spread through his body. His breathing quickened. Now he remembered what had happened during the night, the sound in the darkness, the dimly seen figure, and then\u2014what? Blackout....\n \n Where was he? Who had brought him here? For what purpose?\n \n He thought he knew the answer to the last of those questions. As a member of the original atomic reaction-motor team, he possessed information that other military powers would very much like to obtain. It was absolutely incredible that anyone had managed to abduct him from the heavily guarded confines of the Reservation, yet someone had done it. How?\n \n \n\n \n He pivoted to inspect the room. Even before his eyes could take in the details, he had the impression that there was something wrong about it. To begin with, the style was unfamiliar. There were no straight lines or sharp corners anywhere. The walls were paneled in featureless blue plastic and the doors were smooth surfaces of metal, half ellipses, without knobs. The flowing lines of the chair and table, built apparently from an aluminum alloy, somehow gave the impression of arrested motion. Even after allowances were made for the outlandish design, something about the room still was not right.\n \n His eyes returned to the doors, and he moved over to study the nearer one. As he had noticed, there was no knob, but at the right of this one, at about waist level, a push-button projected out of the wall. He pressed it; the door slid aside and disappeared. Maitland glanced in at the disclosed bathroom, then went over to look at the other door.\n \n There was no button beside this one, nor any other visible means of causing it to open.\n \n Baffled, he turned again and looked at the large open window\u2014and realized what it was that had made the room seem so queer.\n \n It did not look like a jail cell. There were no bars....\n \n Striding across the room, he lunged forward to peer out and violently banged his forehead. He staggered back, grimacing with pain, then reached forward cautious fingers and discovered a hard sheet of stuff so transparent that he had not even suspected its presence. Not glass! Glass was never this clear or strong. A plastic, no doubt, but one he hadn't heard of. Security sometimes had disadvantages.\n \n He looked out at the peaceful vista of river and prairie. The character of the sunlight seemed to indicate that it was afternoon. He became aware that he was hungry.\n \n Where the devil could this place be? And\u2014muscles tightened about his empty stomach\u2014what was in store for him here?\n \n He stood trembling, acutely conscious that he was afraid and helpless, until a flicker of motion at the bottom of the hill near the river drew his attention. Pressing his nose against the window, he strained his eyes to see what it was.\n \n A man and a woman were coming toward him up the hill. Evidently they had been swimming, for each had a towel; the man's was hung around his neck, and the woman was still drying her bobbed black hair.\n \n Maitland speculated on the possibility that this might be Sweden; he didn't know of any other country where public bathing at this time of year was customary. However, that prairie certainly didn't look Scandinavian....\n \n As they came closer, he saw that both of them had dark uniform suntans and showed striking muscular development, like persons who had trained for years with weights. They vanished below his field of view, presumably into the building.\n \n He sat down on the edge of the cot and glared helplessly at the floor.\n \n \n\n \n About half an hour later, the door he couldn't open slid aside into the wall. The man Maitland had seen outside, now clad in gray trunks and sandals, stood across the threshold looking in at him. Maitland stood up and stared back, conscious suddenly that in his rumpled pajamas he made an unimpressive figure.\n \n The fellow looked about forty-five. The first details Maitland noticed were the forehead, which was quite broad, and the calm, clear eyes. The dark hair, white at the temples, was combed back, still damp from swimming. Below, there was a wide mouth and a firm, rounded chin.\n \n This man was intelligent, Maitland decided, and extremely sure of himself.\n \n Somehow, the face didn't go with the rest of him. The man had the head of a thinker, the body of a trained athlete\u2014an unusual combination.\n \n Impassively, the man said, \"My name is Swarts. You want to know where you are. I am not going to tell you.\" He had an accent, European, but otherwise unidentifiable. Possibly German. Maitland opened his mouth to protest, but Swarts went on, \"However, you're free to do all the guessing you want.\" Still there was no suggestion of a smile.\n \n \"Now, these are the rules. You'll be here for about a week. You'll have three meals a day, served in this room. You will not be allowed to leave it except when accompanied by myself. You will not be harmed in any way, provided you cooperate. And you can forget the silly idea that we want your childish secrets about rocket motors.\" Maitland's heart jumped. \"My reason for bringing you here is altogether different. I want to give you some psychological tests....\"\n \n \"Are you crazy?\" Maitland asked quietly. \"Do you realize that at this moment one of the greatest hunts in history must be going on? I'll admit I'm baffled as to where we are and how you got me here\u2014but it seems to me that you could have found someone less conspicuous to give your tests to.\"\n \n Briefly, then, Swarts did smile. \"They won't find you,\" he said. \"Now, come with me.\"\n \n \n\n \n After that outlandish cell, Swarts' laboratory looked rather commonplace. There was something like a surgical cot in the center, and a bench along one wall supported several electronics cabinets. A couple of them had cathode ray tube screens, and they all presented a normal complement of meters, pilot lights, and switches. Cables from them ran across the ceiling and came to a focus above the high flat cot in the center of the room.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Swarts said. When Maitland hesitated, Swarts added,\n\"Understand one thing\u2014the more you cooperate, the easier things will be for you. If necessary, I will use coercion. I can get all my results against your will, if I must. I would prefer not to. Please don't make me.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" Maitland asked. \"What is all this?\"\n \n Swarts hesitated, though not, Maitland astonishedly felt, to evade an answer, but to find the proper words. \"You can think of it as a lie detector. These instruments will record your reactions to the tests I give you. That is as much as you need to know. Now lie down.\"\n \n Maitland stood there for a moment, deliberately relaxing his tensed muscles. \"Make me.\"\n \n If Swarts was irritated, he didn't show it. \"That was the first test,\" he said. \"Let me put it another way. I would appreciate it a lot if you'd lie down on this cot. I would like to test my apparatus.\"\n \n Maitland shook his head stubbornly.\n \n \"I see,\" Swarts said. \"You want to find out what you're up against.\"\n \n He moved so fast that Maitland couldn't block the blow. It was to the solar plexus, just hard enough to double him up, fighting for breath. He felt an arm under his back, another behind his knees. Then he was on the cot. When he was able to breathe again, there were straps across his chest, hips, knees, ankles, and arms, and Swarts was tightening a clamp that held his head immovable.\n \n \n\n \n Presently, a number of tiny electrodes were adhering to his temples and to other portions of his body, and a minute microphone was clinging to the skin over his heart. These devices terminated in cables that hung from the ceiling. A sphygmomanometer sleeve was wrapped tightly around his left upper arm, its rubber tube trailing to a small black box clamped to the frame of the cot. Another cable left the box and joined the others.\n \n So\u2014Maitland thought\u2014Swarts could record changes in his skin potential, heartbeat, and blood pressure: the involuntary responses of the body to stimuli.\n \n The question was, what were the stimuli to be?\n \n \"Your name,\" said Swarts, \"is Robert Lee Maitland. You are thirty-four years old. You are an engineer, specialty heat transfer, particularly as applied to rocket motors.... No, Mr. Maitland, I'm not going to question you about your work; just forget about it. Your home town is Madison, Wisconsin....\"\n \n \"You seem to know everything about me,\" Maitland said defiantly, looking up into the hanging forest of cabling. \"Why this recital?\"\n \n \"I do not know everything about you\u2014yet. And I'm testing the equipment, calibrating it to your reactions.\" He went on, \"Your favorite recreations are chess and reading what you term science fiction. Maitland, how would you like to go to the Moon ?\"\n \n Something eager leaped in Maitland's breast at the abrupt question, and he tried to turn his head. Then he forced himself to relax. \"What do you mean?\"\n \n Swarts was chuckling. \"I really hit a semantic push-button there, didn't I? Maitland, I brought you here because you're a man who wants to go to the Moon. I'm interested in finding out why .\"\n \n \n\n \n In the evening a girl brought Maitland his meal. As the door slid aside, he automatically stood up, and they stared at each other for several seconds.\n \n She had the high cheekbones and almond eyes of an Oriental, skin that glowed like gold in the evening light, yet thick coiled braids of blonde hair that glittered like polished brass. Shorts and a sleeveless blouse of some thick, reddish, metallic-looking fabric clung to her body, and over that she was wearing a light, ankle-length cloak of what seemed to be white wool.\n \n She was looking at him with palpable curiosity and something like expectancy. Maitland sighed and said, \"Hello,\" then glanced down self-consciously at his wrinkled green pajamas.\n \n \n\n \n She smiled, put the tray of food on the table, and swept out, her cloak billowing behind her. Maitland remained standing, staring at the closed door for a minute after she was gone.\n \n Later, when he had finished the steak and corn on the cob and shredded carrots, and a feeling of warm well-being was diffusing from his stomach to his extremities, he sat down on the bed to watch the sunset and to think.\n \n There were three questions for which he required answers before he could formulate any plan or policy.\n \n Where was he?\n \n Who was Swarts?\n \n What was the purpose of the \"tests\" he was being given?\n \n It was possible, of course, that this was all an elaborate scheme for getting military secrets, despite Swarts' protestations to the contrary. Maitland frowned. This place certainly didn't have the appearance of a military establishment, and so far there had been nothing to suggest the kind of interrogation to be expected from foreign intelligence officers.\n \n It might be better to tackle the first question first. He looked at the Sun, a red spheroid already half below the horizon, and tried to think of a region that had this kind of terrain. That prairie out there was unique. Almost anywhere in the world, land like that would be cultivated, not allowed to go to grass.\n \n This might be somewhere in Africa....\n \n He shook his head, puzzled. The Sun disappeared and its blood-hued glow began to fade from the sky. Maitland sat there, trying to get hold of the problem from an angle where it wouldn't just slip away. After a while the western sky became a screen of clear luminous blue, a backdrop for a pure white brilliant star. As always at that sight, Maitland felt his worry drain away, leaving an almost mystical sense of peace and an undefinable longing.\n \n Venus, the most beautiful of the planets.\n \n Maitland kept track of them all in their majestic paths through the constellations, but Venus was his favorite. Time and time again he had watched its steady climb higher and higher in the western sky, its transient rule there as evening star, its progression toward the horizon, and loved it equally in its alter ego of morning star. Venus was an old friend. An old friend....\n \n Something icy settled on the back of his neck, ran down his spine, and diffused into his body. He stared at the planet unbelievingly, fists clenched, forgetting to breathe.\n \n Last night Venus hadn't been there.\n \n Venus was a morning star just now....\n  Just now!\n \n \n He realized the truth in that moment.\n \n \n\n \n Later, when that jewel of a planet had set and the stars were out, he lay on the bed, still warm with excitement and relief. He didn't have to worry any more about military secrets, or who Swarts was. Those questions were irrelevant now. And now he could accept the psychological tests at their face value; most likely, they were what they purported to be.\n \n Only one question of importance remained:\n \n What year was this?\n \n He grimaced in the darkness, an involuntary muscular expression of jubilation and excitement. The future ! Here was the opportunity for the greatest adventure imaginable to 20th Century man.\n \n Somewhere, out there under the stars, there must be grand glittering cities and busy spaceports, roaring gateways to the planets. Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus\u2014somewhere, perhaps, men who had visited the distant luring stars and returned. Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars!\n \n And he had a chance to become a part of all that! He could spend his life among the planets, a citizen of deep space, a voyager of the challenging spaceways between the solar worlds.\n \n \"I'm adaptable,\" he told himself gleefully. \"I can learn fast. There'll be a job for me out there....\"\n  If\u2014\n \n \n Suddenly sobered, he rolled over and put his feet on the floor, sat in the darkness thinking. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would have to find a way of breaking down Swarts' reticence. He would have to make the man realize that secrecy wasn't necessary in this case. And if Swarts still wouldn't talk, he would have to find a way of forcing the issue. The fellow had said that he didn't need cooperation to get his results, but\u2014\n \n After a while Maitland smiled to himself and went back to bed.\n \n \n\n \n He woke in the morning with someone gently shaking his shoulder. He rolled over and looked up at the girl who had brought him his meal the evening before. There was a tray on the table and he sniffed the smell of bacon. The girl smiled at him. She was dressed as before, except that she had discarded the white cloak.\n \n As he swung his legs to the floor, she started toward the door, carrying the tray with the dirty dishes from yesterday. He stopped her with the word, \"Miss!\"\n \n She turned, and he thought there was something eager in her face.\n \n \"Miss, do you speak my language?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" hesitantly. She lingered too long on the hiss of the last consonant.\n \n \"Miss,\" he asked, watching her face intently, \"what year is this?\"\n \n Startlingly, she laughed, a mellow peal of mirth that had nothing forced about it. She turned toward the door again and said over her shoulder, \"You will have to ask Swarts about that. I cannot tell you.\"\n \n \"Wait! You mean you don't know?\"\n \n She shook her head. \"I cannot tell you.\"\n \n \"All right; we'll let it go at that.\"\n \n She grinned at him again as the door slid shut.\n \n \n\n \n Swarts came half an hour later, and Maitland began his planned offensive.\n \n \"What year is this?\"\n \n Swarts' steely eyes locked with his. \"You know what the date is,\" he stated.\n \n \"No, I don't. Not since yesterday.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Swarts said patiently, \"let's get going. We have a lot to get through this morning.\"\n \n \"I know this isn't 1950. It's probably not even the 20th Century. Venus was a morning star before you brought me here. Now it's an evening star.\"\n \n \"Never mind that. Come.\"\n \n Wordlessly, Maitland climbed to his feet, preceded Swarts to the laboratory, lay down and allowed him to fasten the straps and attach the instruments, making no resistance at all. When Swarts started saying a list of words\u2014doubtlessly some sort of semantic reaction test\u2014Maitland began the job of integrating \"csc\n 3\n x dx\" in his head. It was a calculation which required great concentration and frequent tracing back of steps. After several minutes, he noticed that Swarts had stopped calling words. He opened his eyes to find the other man standing over him, looking somewhat exasperated and a little baffled.\n \n \"What year is this?\" Maitland asked in a conversational tone.\n \n \"We'll try another series of tests.\"\n \n It took Swarts nearly twenty minutes to set up the new apparatus. He lowered a bulky affair with two cylindrical tubes like the twin stacks of a binocular microscope over Maitland's head, so that the lenses at the ends of the tubes were about half an inch from the engineer's eyes. He attached tiny clamps to Maitland's eyelashes.\n \n \"These will keep you from holding your eyes shut,\" he said. \"You can blink, but the springs are too strong for you to hold your eyelids down against the tension.\"\n \n He inserted button earphones into Maitland's ears\u2014\n \n And then the show began.\n \n He was looking at a door in a partly darkened room, and there were footsteps outside, a peremptory knocking. The door flew open, and outlined against the light of the hall, he saw a man with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The man shouted, \"Now I've got you, you wife-stealer!\" He swung the shotgun around and pulled the trigger. There was a terrible blast of sound and the flash of smokeless powder\u2014then blackness.\n \n With a deliberate effort, Maitland unclenched his fists and tried to slow his breathing. Some kind of emotional reaction test\u2014what was the countermove? He closed his eyes, but shortly the muscles around them declared excruciatingly that they couldn't keep that up.\n \n Now he was looking at a girl. She....\n \n Maitland gritted his teeth and fought to use his brain; then he had it.\n \n He thought of a fat slob of a bully who had beaten him up one day after school. He remembered a talk he had heard by a politician who had all the intelligent social responsibility of a rogue gorilla, but no more. He brooded over the damnable stupidity and short-sightedness of Swarts in standing by his silly rules and not telling him about this new world.\n \n Within a minute, he was in an ungovernable rage. His muscles tightened against the restraining straps. He panted, sweat came out on his forehead, and he began to curse. Swarts! How he hated....\n \n The scene was suddenly a flock of sheep spread over a green hillside. There was blood hammering in Maitland's temples. His face felt hot and swollen and he writhed against the restraint of the straps.\n \n The scene disappeared, the lenses of the projector retreated from his eyes and Swarts was standing over him, white-lipped. Maitland swore at him for a few seconds, then relaxed and smiled weakly. His head was starting to ache from the effort of blinking.\n \n \"What year is this?\" he asked.\n \n \"All right,\" Swarts said. \"A.D. 2634.\"\n \n Maitland's smile became a grin.\n \n \n\n \n \"I really haven't the time to waste talking irrelevancies,\" Swarts said a while later. \"Honestly. Maitland, I'm working against a time limit. If you'll cooperate, I'll tell Ching to answer your questions.\"'\n \n \"Ching?\"\n \n \"Ingrid Ching is the girl who has been bringing you your meals.\"\n \n Maitland considered a moment, then nodded. Swarts lowered the projector to his eyes again, and this time the engineer did not resist.\n \n That evening, he could hardly wait for her to come. Too excited to sit and watch the sunset, he paced interminably about the room, sometimes whistling nervously, snapping his fingers, sitting down and jittering one leg. After a while he noticed that he was whistling the same theme over and over: a minute's thought identified it as that exuberant mounting phrase which recurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.\n \n He forgot about it and went on whistling. He was picturing himself aboard a ship dropping in toward Mars, making planetfall at Syrtis Major; he was seeing visions of Venus and the awesome beauty of Saturn. In his mind, he circled the Moon, and viewed the Earth as a huge bright globe against the constellations....\n \n Finally the door slid aside and she appeared, carrying the usual tray of food. She smiled at him, making dimples in her golden skin and revealing a perfect set of teeth, and put the tray on the table.\n \n \"I think you are wonderful,\" she laughed. \"You get everything you want, even from Swarts, and I have not been able to get even a little of what I want from him. I want to travel in time, go back to your 20th Century. And I wanted to talk with you, and he would not let me.\" She laughed again, hands on her rounded hips. \"I have never seen him so irritated as he was this noon.\"\n \n Maitland urged her into the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eagerly he asked, \"Why the devil do you want to go to the 20th Century? Believe me, I've been there, and what I've seen of this world looks a lot better.\"\n \n She shrugged. \"Swarts says that I want to go back to the Dark Age of Technology because I have not adapted well to modern culture. Myself, I think I have just a romantic nature. Far times and places look more exciting....\"\n \n \"How do you mean\u2014\" Maitland wrinkled his brow\u2014\"adapt to modern culture? Don't tell me you're from another time!\"\n \n \"Oh, no! But my home is Aresund, a little fishing village at the head of a fiord in what you would call Norway. So far north, we are much behind the times. We live in the old way, from the sea, speak the old tongue.\"\n \n \n\n \n He looked at her golden features, such a felicitous blend of Oriental and European characteristics, and hesitantly asked, \"Maybe I shouldn't.... This is a little personal, but ... you don't look altogether like the Norwegians of my time.\"\n \n His fear that she would be offended proved to be completely unjustified. She merely laughed and said, \"There has been much history since 1950. Five hundred years ago, Europe was overrun by Pan-Orientals. Today you could not find anywhere a 'pure' European or Asiatic.\" She giggled. \"Swarts' ancestors from your time must be cursing in their graves. His family is Afrikander all the way back, but one of his great-grandfathers was pure-blooded Bantu. His full name is Lassisi Swarts.\"\n \n Maitland wrinkled his brow. \"Afrikander?\"\n \n \"The South Africans.\" Something strange came into her eyes. It might have been awe, or even hatred; he could not tell. \"The Pan-Orientals eventually conquered all the world, except for North America\u2014the last remnant of the American World Empire\u2014and southern Africa. The Afrikanders had been partly isolated for several centuries then, and they had developed technology while the rest of the world lost it. They had a tradition of white supremacy, and in addition they were terrified of being encircled.\" She sighed. \"They ruled the next world empire and it was founded on the slaughter of one and a half billion human beings. That went into the history books as the War of Annihilation.\"\n \n \"So many? How?\"\n \n \"They were clever with machines, the Afrikanders. They made armies of them. Armies of invincible killing-machines, produced in robot factories from robot-mined ores.... Very clever.\" She gave a little shudder.\n \n \"And yet they founded modern civilization,\" she added. \"The grandsons of the technicians who built the Machine Army set up our robot production system, and today no human being has to dirty his hands raising food or manufacturing things. It could never have been done, either, before the population was\u2014reduced to three hundred million.\"\n \n \"Then the Afrikanders are still on top? Still the masters?\"\n \n \n\n \n She shook her head. \"There are no more Afrikanders.\"\n \n \"Rebellion?\"\n \n \"No. Intermarriage. Racial blending. There was a psychology of guilt behind it. So huge a crime eventually required a proportionate expiation. Afrikaans is still the world language, but there is only one race now. No more masters or slaves.\"\n \n They were both silent for a moment, and then she sighed. \"Let us not talk about them any more.\"\n \n \"Robot factories and farms,\" Maitland mused. \"What else? What means of transportation? Do you have interstellar flight yet?\"\n \n \"Inter-what?\"\n \n \"Have men visited the stars?\"\n \n She shook her head, bewildered.\n \n \"I always thought that would be a tough problem to crack,\" he agreed.\n\"But tell me about what men are doing in the Solar System. How is life on Mars and Venus, and how long does it take to get to those places?\"\n \n He waited, expectantly silent, but she only looked puzzled. \"I don't understand. Mars? What are Mars?\"\n \n After several seconds, Maitland swallowed. Something seemed to be the matter with his throat, making it difficult for him to speak. \"Surely you have space travel?\"\n \n She frowned and shook her head. \"What does that mean\u2014space travel?\"\n \n He was gripping the edge of the bed now, glaring at her. \"A civilization that could discover time travel and build robot factories wouldn't find it hard to send a ship to Mars!\"\n \n \"A ship ? Oh, you mean something like a vliegvlotter . Why, no, I don't suppose it would be hard. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?\"\n \n He was on his feet towering over her, fists clenched. She raised her arms as if to shield her face if he should hit her. \"Let's get this perfectly clear,\" he said, more harshly than he realized. \"So far as you know, no one has ever visited the planets, and no one wants to. Is that right?\"\n \n She nodded apprehensively. \"I have never heard of it being done.\"\n \n He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After a while he looked up and said bitterly, \"You're looking at a man who would give his life to get to Mars. I thought I would in my time. I was positive I would when I knew I was in your time. And now I know I never will.\"\n \n \n\n \n The cot creaked beside him and he felt a soft arm about his shoulders and fingers delicately stroking his brow. Presently he opened his eyes and looked at her. \"I just don't understand,\" he said. \"It seemed obvious to me that whenever men were able to reach the planets, they'd do it.\"\n \n Her pitying eyes were on his face. He hitched himself around so that he was facing her. \"I've got to understand. I've got to know why . What happened? Why don't men want the planets any more?\"\n \n \"Honestly,\" she said, \"I did not know they ever had.\" She hesitated.\n\"Maybe you are asking the wrong question.\"\n \n He furrowed his brow, bewildered now by her.\n \n \"I mean,\" she explained, \"maybe you should ask why people in the 20th Century did want to go to worlds men are not suited to inhabit.\"\n \n Maitland felt his face become hot. \"Men can go anywhere, if they want to bad enough.\"\n \n \"But why ?\"\n \n Despite his sudden irrational anger toward her, Maitland tried to stick to logic. \"Living space, for one thing. The only permanent solution to the population problem....\"\n \n \"We have no population problem. A hundred years ago, we realized that the key to social stability is a limited population. Our economic system was built to take care of three hundred million people, and we have held the number at that.\"\n \n \"Birth control,\" Maitland scoffed. \"How do you make it work\u2014secret police?\"\n \n \"No. Education. Each of us has the right to two children, and we cherish that right so much that we make every effort to see that those two are the best children we could possibly produce....\"\n \n She broke off, looking a little self-conscious. \"You understand, what I have been saying applies to most of the world. In some places like Aresund, things are different. Backward. I still do not feel that I belong here, although the people of the town have accepted me as one of them.\"\n \n \"Even,\" he said, \"granting that you have solved the population problem, there's still the adventure of the thing. Surely, somewhere, there must be men who still feel that.... Ingrid, doesn't it fire something in your blood, the idea of going to Mars\u2014just to go there and see what's there and walk under a new sky and a smaller Sun? Aren't you interested in finding out what the canals are? Or what's under the clouds of Venus? Wouldn't you like to see the rings of Saturn from, a distance of only two hundred thousand miles?\" His hands were trembling as he stopped.\n \n She shrugged her shapely shoulders. \"Go into the past\u2014yes! But go out there? I still cannot see why.\"\n \n \"Has the spirit of adventure evaporated from the human race, or what ?\"\n \n She smiled. \"In a room downstairs there is the head of a lion. Swarts killed the beast when he was a young man. He used a spear. And time traveling is the greatest adventure there is. At least, that is the way I feel. Listen, Bob.\" She laid a hand on his arm. \"You grew up in the Age of Technology. Everybody was terribly excited about what could be done with machines\u2014machines to blow up a city all at once, or fly around the world, or take a man to Mars. We have had our fill of\u2014what is the word?\u2014gadgets. Our machines serve us, and so long as they function right, we are satisfied to forget about them.\n \n \"Because this is the Age of Man . We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists, like Swarts, are studying human rather than nuclear reactions. We are much more fascinated by the life and death of cultures than by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. With us, it is the people that are important, not gadgets.\"\n \n Maitland stared at her, his face blank. His mind had just manufactured a discouraging analogy. His present position was like that of an earnest 12th Century crusader, deposited by some freak of nature into the year 1950, trying to find a way of reanimating the anti-Mohammedan movement. What chance would he have? The unfortunate knight would argue in vain that the atomic bomb offered a means of finally destroying the infidel....\n \n Maitland looked up at the girl, who was regarding him silently with troubled eyes. \"I think I'd like to be alone for a while,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of space in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31989, "query_start_index": 31991, "query_end_index": 32048, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Throughout the story, Maitland shows his passion and knowledge for space; it defines him as a character and helps him in figuring out certain aspects of his situation. Maitland's passion for space is first introduced when Swarts asks him about going to the Moon. Maitland is taken aback by this question, and Swarts knows that the idea is extremely important to him; in fact, Maitland's dream of going to the Moon is the whole reason why he is experiencing these tests. Later on, space is significant in helping Maitland come to a realization. As he stares out the window trying to gauge where in the world he is located, he notices that Venus, his favorite planet, is in the sky during the evening, when back at the Reservation, it was a morning star. Maitland's knowledge of constellations and planets leads him to realize that he must have traveled into the future. Once Maitland realizes this, his main question is about space travel, and whether humans have achieved it. Once he learns that it has not been attempted or achieved, Maitland's motivation is lost; space was the driving force in his life and career, and space travel not being possible left him hopeless."}
{"id": "51274_3", "pid": "51274_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAMBITION\n \n \n By WILLIAM L. BADE\n \n Illustrated by L. WOROMAY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n To the men of the future, the scientific goals of today were as incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail!\n \n \n \n There was a thump. Maitland stirred, came half awake, and opened his eyes. The room was dark except where a broad shaft of moonlight from the open window fell on the foot of his bed. Outside, the residential section of the Reservation slept silently under the pale illumination of the full Moon. He guessed sleepily that it was about three o'clock.\n \n What had he heard? He had a definite impression that the sound had come from within the room. It had sounded like someone stumbling into a chair, or\u2014\n \n Something moved in the darkness on the other side of the room. Maitland started to sit up and it was as though a thousand volts had shorted his brain....\n \n This time, he awoke more normally. He opened his eyes, looked through the window at a section of azure sky, listened to the singing of birds somewhere outside. A beautiful day. In the middle of the process of stretching his rested muscles, arms extended back, legs tensed, he froze, looking up\u2014for the first time really seeing the ceiling. He turned his head, then rolled off the bed, wide awake.\n  This wasn't his room!\n \n \n The lawn outside wasn't part of the Reservation! Where the labs and the shops should have been, there was deep prairie grass, then a green ocean pushed into waves by the breeze stretching to the horizon. This wasn't the California desert! Down the hill, where the liquid oxygen plant ought to have been, a river wound across the scene, almost hidden beneath its leafy roof of huge ancient trees.\n \n Shock contracted Maitland's diaphragm and spread through his body. His breathing quickened. Now he remembered what had happened during the night, the sound in the darkness, the dimly seen figure, and then\u2014what? Blackout....\n \n Where was he? Who had brought him here? For what purpose?\n \n He thought he knew the answer to the last of those questions. As a member of the original atomic reaction-motor team, he possessed information that other military powers would very much like to obtain. It was absolutely incredible that anyone had managed to abduct him from the heavily guarded confines of the Reservation, yet someone had done it. How?\n \n \n\n \n He pivoted to inspect the room. Even before his eyes could take in the details, he had the impression that there was something wrong about it. To begin with, the style was unfamiliar. There were no straight lines or sharp corners anywhere. The walls were paneled in featureless blue plastic and the doors were smooth surfaces of metal, half ellipses, without knobs. The flowing lines of the chair and table, built apparently from an aluminum alloy, somehow gave the impression of arrested motion. Even after allowances were made for the outlandish design, something about the room still was not right.\n \n His eyes returned to the doors, and he moved over to study the nearer one. As he had noticed, there was no knob, but at the right of this one, at about waist level, a push-button projected out of the wall. He pressed it; the door slid aside and disappeared. Maitland glanced in at the disclosed bathroom, then went over to look at the other door.\n \n There was no button beside this one, nor any other visible means of causing it to open.\n \n Baffled, he turned again and looked at the large open window\u2014and realized what it was that had made the room seem so queer.\n \n It did not look like a jail cell. There were no bars....\n \n Striding across the room, he lunged forward to peer out and violently banged his forehead. He staggered back, grimacing with pain, then reached forward cautious fingers and discovered a hard sheet of stuff so transparent that he had not even suspected its presence. Not glass! Glass was never this clear or strong. A plastic, no doubt, but one he hadn't heard of. Security sometimes had disadvantages.\n \n He looked out at the peaceful vista of river and prairie. The character of the sunlight seemed to indicate that it was afternoon. He became aware that he was hungry.\n \n Where the devil could this place be? And\u2014muscles tightened about his empty stomach\u2014what was in store for him here?\n \n He stood trembling, acutely conscious that he was afraid and helpless, until a flicker of motion at the bottom of the hill near the river drew his attention. Pressing his nose against the window, he strained his eyes to see what it was.\n \n A man and a woman were coming toward him up the hill. Evidently they had been swimming, for each had a towel; the man's was hung around his neck, and the woman was still drying her bobbed black hair.\n \n Maitland speculated on the possibility that this might be Sweden; he didn't know of any other country where public bathing at this time of year was customary. However, that prairie certainly didn't look Scandinavian....\n \n As they came closer, he saw that both of them had dark uniform suntans and showed striking muscular development, like persons who had trained for years with weights. They vanished below his field of view, presumably into the building.\n \n He sat down on the edge of the cot and glared helplessly at the floor.\n \n \n\n \n About half an hour later, the door he couldn't open slid aside into the wall. The man Maitland had seen outside, now clad in gray trunks and sandals, stood across the threshold looking in at him. Maitland stood up and stared back, conscious suddenly that in his rumpled pajamas he made an unimpressive figure.\n \n The fellow looked about forty-five. The first details Maitland noticed were the forehead, which was quite broad, and the calm, clear eyes. The dark hair, white at the temples, was combed back, still damp from swimming. Below, there was a wide mouth and a firm, rounded chin.\n \n This man was intelligent, Maitland decided, and extremely sure of himself.\n \n Somehow, the face didn't go with the rest of him. The man had the head of a thinker, the body of a trained athlete\u2014an unusual combination.\n \n Impassively, the man said, \"My name is Swarts. You want to know where you are. I am not going to tell you.\" He had an accent, European, but otherwise unidentifiable. Possibly German. Maitland opened his mouth to protest, but Swarts went on, \"However, you're free to do all the guessing you want.\" Still there was no suggestion of a smile.\n \n \"Now, these are the rules. You'll be here for about a week. You'll have three meals a day, served in this room. You will not be allowed to leave it except when accompanied by myself. You will not be harmed in any way, provided you cooperate. And you can forget the silly idea that we want your childish secrets about rocket motors.\" Maitland's heart jumped. \"My reason for bringing you here is altogether different. I want to give you some psychological tests....\"\n \n \"Are you crazy?\" Maitland asked quietly. \"Do you realize that at this moment one of the greatest hunts in history must be going on? I'll admit I'm baffled as to where we are and how you got me here\u2014but it seems to me that you could have found someone less conspicuous to give your tests to.\"\n \n Briefly, then, Swarts did smile. \"They won't find you,\" he said. \"Now, come with me.\"\n \n \n\n \n After that outlandish cell, Swarts' laboratory looked rather commonplace. There was something like a surgical cot in the center, and a bench along one wall supported several electronics cabinets. A couple of them had cathode ray tube screens, and they all presented a normal complement of meters, pilot lights, and switches. Cables from them ran across the ceiling and came to a focus above the high flat cot in the center of the room.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Swarts said. When Maitland hesitated, Swarts added,\n\"Understand one thing\u2014the more you cooperate, the easier things will be for you. If necessary, I will use coercion. I can get all my results against your will, if I must. I would prefer not to. Please don't make me.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" Maitland asked. \"What is all this?\"\n \n Swarts hesitated, though not, Maitland astonishedly felt, to evade an answer, but to find the proper words. \"You can think of it as a lie detector. These instruments will record your reactions to the tests I give you. That is as much as you need to know. Now lie down.\"\n \n Maitland stood there for a moment, deliberately relaxing his tensed muscles. \"Make me.\"\n \n If Swarts was irritated, he didn't show it. \"That was the first test,\" he said. \"Let me put it another way. I would appreciate it a lot if you'd lie down on this cot. I would like to test my apparatus.\"\n \n Maitland shook his head stubbornly.\n \n \"I see,\" Swarts said. \"You want to find out what you're up against.\"\n \n He moved so fast that Maitland couldn't block the blow. It was to the solar plexus, just hard enough to double him up, fighting for breath. He felt an arm under his back, another behind his knees. Then he was on the cot. When he was able to breathe again, there were straps across his chest, hips, knees, ankles, and arms, and Swarts was tightening a clamp that held his head immovable.\n \n \n\n \n Presently, a number of tiny electrodes were adhering to his temples and to other portions of his body, and a minute microphone was clinging to the skin over his heart. These devices terminated in cables that hung from the ceiling. A sphygmomanometer sleeve was wrapped tightly around his left upper arm, its rubber tube trailing to a small black box clamped to the frame of the cot. Another cable left the box and joined the others.\n \n So\u2014Maitland thought\u2014Swarts could record changes in his skin potential, heartbeat, and blood pressure: the involuntary responses of the body to stimuli.\n \n The question was, what were the stimuli to be?\n \n \"Your name,\" said Swarts, \"is Robert Lee Maitland. You are thirty-four years old. You are an engineer, specialty heat transfer, particularly as applied to rocket motors.... No, Mr. Maitland, I'm not going to question you about your work; just forget about it. Your home town is Madison, Wisconsin....\"\n \n \"You seem to know everything about me,\" Maitland said defiantly, looking up into the hanging forest of cabling. \"Why this recital?\"\n \n \"I do not know everything about you\u2014yet. And I'm testing the equipment, calibrating it to your reactions.\" He went on, \"Your favorite recreations are chess and reading what you term science fiction. Maitland, how would you like to go to the Moon ?\"\n \n Something eager leaped in Maitland's breast at the abrupt question, and he tried to turn his head. Then he forced himself to relax. \"What do you mean?\"\n \n Swarts was chuckling. \"I really hit a semantic push-button there, didn't I? Maitland, I brought you here because you're a man who wants to go to the Moon. I'm interested in finding out why .\"\n \n \n\n \n In the evening a girl brought Maitland his meal. As the door slid aside, he automatically stood up, and they stared at each other for several seconds.\n \n She had the high cheekbones and almond eyes of an Oriental, skin that glowed like gold in the evening light, yet thick coiled braids of blonde hair that glittered like polished brass. Shorts and a sleeveless blouse of some thick, reddish, metallic-looking fabric clung to her body, and over that she was wearing a light, ankle-length cloak of what seemed to be white wool.\n \n She was looking at him with palpable curiosity and something like expectancy. Maitland sighed and said, \"Hello,\" then glanced down self-consciously at his wrinkled green pajamas.\n \n \n\n \n She smiled, put the tray of food on the table, and swept out, her cloak billowing behind her. Maitland remained standing, staring at the closed door for a minute after she was gone.\n \n Later, when he had finished the steak and corn on the cob and shredded carrots, and a feeling of warm well-being was diffusing from his stomach to his extremities, he sat down on the bed to watch the sunset and to think.\n \n There were three questions for which he required answers before he could formulate any plan or policy.\n \n Where was he?\n \n Who was Swarts?\n \n What was the purpose of the \"tests\" he was being given?\n \n It was possible, of course, that this was all an elaborate scheme for getting military secrets, despite Swarts' protestations to the contrary. Maitland frowned. This place certainly didn't have the appearance of a military establishment, and so far there had been nothing to suggest the kind of interrogation to be expected from foreign intelligence officers.\n \n It might be better to tackle the first question first. He looked at the Sun, a red spheroid already half below the horizon, and tried to think of a region that had this kind of terrain. That prairie out there was unique. Almost anywhere in the world, land like that would be cultivated, not allowed to go to grass.\n \n This might be somewhere in Africa....\n \n He shook his head, puzzled. The Sun disappeared and its blood-hued glow began to fade from the sky. Maitland sat there, trying to get hold of the problem from an angle where it wouldn't just slip away. After a while the western sky became a screen of clear luminous blue, a backdrop for a pure white brilliant star. As always at that sight, Maitland felt his worry drain away, leaving an almost mystical sense of peace and an undefinable longing.\n \n Venus, the most beautiful of the planets.\n \n Maitland kept track of them all in their majestic paths through the constellations, but Venus was his favorite. Time and time again he had watched its steady climb higher and higher in the western sky, its transient rule there as evening star, its progression toward the horizon, and loved it equally in its alter ego of morning star. Venus was an old friend. An old friend....\n \n Something icy settled on the back of his neck, ran down his spine, and diffused into his body. He stared at the planet unbelievingly, fists clenched, forgetting to breathe.\n \n Last night Venus hadn't been there.\n \n Venus was a morning star just now....\n  Just now!\n \n \n He realized the truth in that moment.\n \n \n\n \n Later, when that jewel of a planet had set and the stars were out, he lay on the bed, still warm with excitement and relief. He didn't have to worry any more about military secrets, or who Swarts was. Those questions were irrelevant now. And now he could accept the psychological tests at their face value; most likely, they were what they purported to be.\n \n Only one question of importance remained:\n \n What year was this?\n \n He grimaced in the darkness, an involuntary muscular expression of jubilation and excitement. The future ! Here was the opportunity for the greatest adventure imaginable to 20th Century man.\n \n Somewhere, out there under the stars, there must be grand glittering cities and busy spaceports, roaring gateways to the planets. Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus\u2014somewhere, perhaps, men who had visited the distant luring stars and returned. Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars!\n \n And he had a chance to become a part of all that! He could spend his life among the planets, a citizen of deep space, a voyager of the challenging spaceways between the solar worlds.\n \n \"I'm adaptable,\" he told himself gleefully. \"I can learn fast. There'll be a job for me out there....\"\n  If\u2014\n \n \n Suddenly sobered, he rolled over and put his feet on the floor, sat in the darkness thinking. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would have to find a way of breaking down Swarts' reticence. He would have to make the man realize that secrecy wasn't necessary in this case. And if Swarts still wouldn't talk, he would have to find a way of forcing the issue. The fellow had said that he didn't need cooperation to get his results, but\u2014\n \n After a while Maitland smiled to himself and went back to bed.\n \n \n\n \n He woke in the morning with someone gently shaking his shoulder. He rolled over and looked up at the girl who had brought him his meal the evening before. There was a tray on the table and he sniffed the smell of bacon. The girl smiled at him. She was dressed as before, except that she had discarded the white cloak.\n \n As he swung his legs to the floor, she started toward the door, carrying the tray with the dirty dishes from yesterday. He stopped her with the word, \"Miss!\"\n \n She turned, and he thought there was something eager in her face.\n \n \"Miss, do you speak my language?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" hesitantly. She lingered too long on the hiss of the last consonant.\n \n \"Miss,\" he asked, watching her face intently, \"what year is this?\"\n \n Startlingly, she laughed, a mellow peal of mirth that had nothing forced about it. She turned toward the door again and said over her shoulder, \"You will have to ask Swarts about that. I cannot tell you.\"\n \n \"Wait! You mean you don't know?\"\n \n She shook her head. \"I cannot tell you.\"\n \n \"All right; we'll let it go at that.\"\n \n She grinned at him again as the door slid shut.\n \n \n\n \n Swarts came half an hour later, and Maitland began his planned offensive.\n \n \"What year is this?\"\n \n Swarts' steely eyes locked with his. \"You know what the date is,\" he stated.\n \n \"No, I don't. Not since yesterday.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Swarts said patiently, \"let's get going. We have a lot to get through this morning.\"\n \n \"I know this isn't 1950. It's probably not even the 20th Century. Venus was a morning star before you brought me here. Now it's an evening star.\"\n \n \"Never mind that. Come.\"\n \n Wordlessly, Maitland climbed to his feet, preceded Swarts to the laboratory, lay down and allowed him to fasten the straps and attach the instruments, making no resistance at all. When Swarts started saying a list of words\u2014doubtlessly some sort of semantic reaction test\u2014Maitland began the job of integrating \"csc\n 3\n x dx\" in his head. It was a calculation which required great concentration and frequent tracing back of steps. After several minutes, he noticed that Swarts had stopped calling words. He opened his eyes to find the other man standing over him, looking somewhat exasperated and a little baffled.\n \n \"What year is this?\" Maitland asked in a conversational tone.\n \n \"We'll try another series of tests.\"\n \n It took Swarts nearly twenty minutes to set up the new apparatus. He lowered a bulky affair with two cylindrical tubes like the twin stacks of a binocular microscope over Maitland's head, so that the lenses at the ends of the tubes were about half an inch from the engineer's eyes. He attached tiny clamps to Maitland's eyelashes.\n \n \"These will keep you from holding your eyes shut,\" he said. \"You can blink, but the springs are too strong for you to hold your eyelids down against the tension.\"\n \n He inserted button earphones into Maitland's ears\u2014\n \n And then the show began.\n \n He was looking at a door in a partly darkened room, and there were footsteps outside, a peremptory knocking. The door flew open, and outlined against the light of the hall, he saw a man with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The man shouted, \"Now I've got you, you wife-stealer!\" He swung the shotgun around and pulled the trigger. There was a terrible blast of sound and the flash of smokeless powder\u2014then blackness.\n \n With a deliberate effort, Maitland unclenched his fists and tried to slow his breathing. Some kind of emotional reaction test\u2014what was the countermove? He closed his eyes, but shortly the muscles around them declared excruciatingly that they couldn't keep that up.\n \n Now he was looking at a girl. She....\n \n Maitland gritted his teeth and fought to use his brain; then he had it.\n \n He thought of a fat slob of a bully who had beaten him up one day after school. He remembered a talk he had heard by a politician who had all the intelligent social responsibility of a rogue gorilla, but no more. He brooded over the damnable stupidity and short-sightedness of Swarts in standing by his silly rules and not telling him about this new world.\n \n Within a minute, he was in an ungovernable rage. His muscles tightened against the restraining straps. He panted, sweat came out on his forehead, and he began to curse. Swarts! How he hated....\n \n The scene was suddenly a flock of sheep spread over a green hillside. There was blood hammering in Maitland's temples. His face felt hot and swollen and he writhed against the restraint of the straps.\n \n The scene disappeared, the lenses of the projector retreated from his eyes and Swarts was standing over him, white-lipped. Maitland swore at him for a few seconds, then relaxed and smiled weakly. His head was starting to ache from the effort of blinking.\n \n \"What year is this?\" he asked.\n \n \"All right,\" Swarts said. \"A.D. 2634.\"\n \n Maitland's smile became a grin.\n \n \n\n \n \"I really haven't the time to waste talking irrelevancies,\" Swarts said a while later. \"Honestly. Maitland, I'm working against a time limit. If you'll cooperate, I'll tell Ching to answer your questions.\"'\n \n \"Ching?\"\n \n \"Ingrid Ching is the girl who has been bringing you your meals.\"\n \n Maitland considered a moment, then nodded. Swarts lowered the projector to his eyes again, and this time the engineer did not resist.\n \n That evening, he could hardly wait for her to come. Too excited to sit and watch the sunset, he paced interminably about the room, sometimes whistling nervously, snapping his fingers, sitting down and jittering one leg. After a while he noticed that he was whistling the same theme over and over: a minute's thought identified it as that exuberant mounting phrase which recurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.\n \n He forgot about it and went on whistling. He was picturing himself aboard a ship dropping in toward Mars, making planetfall at Syrtis Major; he was seeing visions of Venus and the awesome beauty of Saturn. In his mind, he circled the Moon, and viewed the Earth as a huge bright globe against the constellations....\n \n Finally the door slid aside and she appeared, carrying the usual tray of food. She smiled at him, making dimples in her golden skin and revealing a perfect set of teeth, and put the tray on the table.\n \n \"I think you are wonderful,\" she laughed. \"You get everything you want, even from Swarts, and I have not been able to get even a little of what I want from him. I want to travel in time, go back to your 20th Century. And I wanted to talk with you, and he would not let me.\" She laughed again, hands on her rounded hips. \"I have never seen him so irritated as he was this noon.\"\n \n Maitland urged her into the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eagerly he asked, \"Why the devil do you want to go to the 20th Century? Believe me, I've been there, and what I've seen of this world looks a lot better.\"\n \n She shrugged. \"Swarts says that I want to go back to the Dark Age of Technology because I have not adapted well to modern culture. Myself, I think I have just a romantic nature. Far times and places look more exciting....\"\n \n \"How do you mean\u2014\" Maitland wrinkled his brow\u2014\"adapt to modern culture? Don't tell me you're from another time!\"\n \n \"Oh, no! But my home is Aresund, a little fishing village at the head of a fiord in what you would call Norway. So far north, we are much behind the times. We live in the old way, from the sea, speak the old tongue.\"\n \n \n\n \n He looked at her golden features, such a felicitous blend of Oriental and European characteristics, and hesitantly asked, \"Maybe I shouldn't.... This is a little personal, but ... you don't look altogether like the Norwegians of my time.\"\n \n His fear that she would be offended proved to be completely unjustified. She merely laughed and said, \"There has been much history since 1950. Five hundred years ago, Europe was overrun by Pan-Orientals. Today you could not find anywhere a 'pure' European or Asiatic.\" She giggled. \"Swarts' ancestors from your time must be cursing in their graves. His family is Afrikander all the way back, but one of his great-grandfathers was pure-blooded Bantu. His full name is Lassisi Swarts.\"\n \n Maitland wrinkled his brow. \"Afrikander?\"\n \n \"The South Africans.\" Something strange came into her eyes. It might have been awe, or even hatred; he could not tell. \"The Pan-Orientals eventually conquered all the world, except for North America\u2014the last remnant of the American World Empire\u2014and southern Africa. The Afrikanders had been partly isolated for several centuries then, and they had developed technology while the rest of the world lost it. They had a tradition of white supremacy, and in addition they were terrified of being encircled.\" She sighed. \"They ruled the next world empire and it was founded on the slaughter of one and a half billion human beings. That went into the history books as the War of Annihilation.\"\n \n \"So many? How?\"\n \n \"They were clever with machines, the Afrikanders. They made armies of them. Armies of invincible killing-machines, produced in robot factories from robot-mined ores.... Very clever.\" She gave a little shudder.\n \n \"And yet they founded modern civilization,\" she added. \"The grandsons of the technicians who built the Machine Army set up our robot production system, and today no human being has to dirty his hands raising food or manufacturing things. It could never have been done, either, before the population was\u2014reduced to three hundred million.\"\n \n \"Then the Afrikanders are still on top? Still the masters?\"\n \n \n\n \n She shook her head. \"There are no more Afrikanders.\"\n \n \"Rebellion?\"\n \n \"No. Intermarriage. Racial blending. There was a psychology of guilt behind it. So huge a crime eventually required a proportionate expiation. Afrikaans is still the world language, but there is only one race now. No more masters or slaves.\"\n \n They were both silent for a moment, and then she sighed. \"Let us not talk about them any more.\"\n \n \"Robot factories and farms,\" Maitland mused. \"What else? What means of transportation? Do you have interstellar flight yet?\"\n \n \"Inter-what?\"\n \n \"Have men visited the stars?\"\n \n She shook her head, bewildered.\n \n \"I always thought that would be a tough problem to crack,\" he agreed.\n\"But tell me about what men are doing in the Solar System. How is life on Mars and Venus, and how long does it take to get to those places?\"\n \n He waited, expectantly silent, but she only looked puzzled. \"I don't understand. Mars? What are Mars?\"\n \n After several seconds, Maitland swallowed. Something seemed to be the matter with his throat, making it difficult for him to speak. \"Surely you have space travel?\"\n \n She frowned and shook her head. \"What does that mean\u2014space travel?\"\n \n He was gripping the edge of the bed now, glaring at her. \"A civilization that could discover time travel and build robot factories wouldn't find it hard to send a ship to Mars!\"\n \n \"A ship ? Oh, you mean something like a vliegvlotter . Why, no, I don't suppose it would be hard. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?\"\n \n He was on his feet towering over her, fists clenched. She raised her arms as if to shield her face if he should hit her. \"Let's get this perfectly clear,\" he said, more harshly than he realized. \"So far as you know, no one has ever visited the planets, and no one wants to. Is that right?\"\n \n She nodded apprehensively. \"I have never heard of it being done.\"\n \n He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After a while he looked up and said bitterly, \"You're looking at a man who would give his life to get to Mars. I thought I would in my time. I was positive I would when I knew I was in your time. And now I know I never will.\"\n \n \n\n \n The cot creaked beside him and he felt a soft arm about his shoulders and fingers delicately stroking his brow. Presently he opened his eyes and looked at her. \"I just don't understand,\" he said. \"It seemed obvious to me that whenever men were able to reach the planets, they'd do it.\"\n \n Her pitying eyes were on his face. He hitched himself around so that he was facing her. \"I've got to understand. I've got to know why . What happened? Why don't men want the planets any more?\"\n \n \"Honestly,\" she said, \"I did not know they ever had.\" She hesitated.\n\"Maybe you are asking the wrong question.\"\n \n He furrowed his brow, bewildered now by her.\n \n \"I mean,\" she explained, \"maybe you should ask why people in the 20th Century did want to go to worlds men are not suited to inhabit.\"\n \n Maitland felt his face become hot. \"Men can go anywhere, if they want to bad enough.\"\n \n \"But why ?\"\n \n Despite his sudden irrational anger toward her, Maitland tried to stick to logic. \"Living space, for one thing. The only permanent solution to the population problem....\"\n \n \"We have no population problem. A hundred years ago, we realized that the key to social stability is a limited population. Our economic system was built to take care of three hundred million people, and we have held the number at that.\"\n \n \"Birth control,\" Maitland scoffed. \"How do you make it work\u2014secret police?\"\n \n \"No. Education. Each of us has the right to two children, and we cherish that right so much that we make every effort to see that those two are the best children we could possibly produce....\"\n \n She broke off, looking a little self-conscious. \"You understand, what I have been saying applies to most of the world. In some places like Aresund, things are different. Backward. I still do not feel that I belong here, although the people of the town have accepted me as one of them.\"\n \n \"Even,\" he said, \"granting that you have solved the population problem, there's still the adventure of the thing. Surely, somewhere, there must be men who still feel that.... Ingrid, doesn't it fire something in your blood, the idea of going to Mars\u2014just to go there and see what's there and walk under a new sky and a smaller Sun? Aren't you interested in finding out what the canals are? Or what's under the clouds of Venus? Wouldn't you like to see the rings of Saturn from, a distance of only two hundred thousand miles?\" His hands were trembling as he stopped.\n \n She shrugged her shapely shoulders. \"Go into the past\u2014yes! But go out there? I still cannot see why.\"\n \n \"Has the spirit of adventure evaporated from the human race, or what ?\"\n \n She smiled. \"In a room downstairs there is the head of a lion. Swarts killed the beast when he was a young man. He used a spear. And time traveling is the greatest adventure there is. At least, that is the way I feel. Listen, Bob.\" She laid a hand on his arm. \"You grew up in the Age of Technology. Everybody was terribly excited about what could be done with machines\u2014machines to blow up a city all at once, or fly around the world, or take a man to Mars. We have had our fill of\u2014what is the word?\u2014gadgets. Our machines serve us, and so long as they function right, we are satisfied to forget about them.\n \n \"Because this is the Age of Man . We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists, like Swarts, are studying human rather than nuclear reactions. We are much more fascinated by the life and death of cultures than by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. With us, it is the people that are important, not gadgets.\"\n \n Maitland stared at her, his face blank. His mind had just manufactured a discouraging analogy. His present position was like that of an earnest 12th Century crusader, deposited by some freak of nature into the year 1950, trying to find a way of reanimating the anti-Mohammedan movement. What chance would he have? The unfortunate knight would argue in vain that the atomic bomb offered a means of finally destroying the infidel....\n \n Maitland looked up at the girl, who was regarding him silently with troubled eyes. \"I think I'd like to be alone for a while,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of space in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31989, "query_start_index": 31991, "query_end_index": 32048, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Firstly, Swarts asks Maitland a question regarding Moon and he wants to know why Maitland wants to travel to the Moon. Moreover, space and the stars in space helped Maitland realize that they are not in his time anymore. The morning star Venus has become an evening star. Understanding that the people in the future are capable of time travel, Maitland was sure that they are also space travelling. However, when he asks Ching about their interstellar flights, she gets confused. Apparently, there has not been any desire to go to other planets. Even when they have the technology, there is no interest in exploring the space. But they do like to go to the past, they consider this an adventure while space travel is not. "}
{"id": "51274_3", "pid": "51274_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAMBITION\n \n \n By WILLIAM L. BADE\n \n Illustrated by L. WOROMAY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n To the men of the future, the scientific goals of today were as incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail!\n \n \n \n There was a thump. Maitland stirred, came half awake, and opened his eyes. The room was dark except where a broad shaft of moonlight from the open window fell on the foot of his bed. Outside, the residential section of the Reservation slept silently under the pale illumination of the full Moon. He guessed sleepily that it was about three o'clock.\n \n What had he heard? He had a definite impression that the sound had come from within the room. It had sounded like someone stumbling into a chair, or\u2014\n \n Something moved in the darkness on the other side of the room. Maitland started to sit up and it was as though a thousand volts had shorted his brain....\n \n This time, he awoke more normally. He opened his eyes, looked through the window at a section of azure sky, listened to the singing of birds somewhere outside. A beautiful day. In the middle of the process of stretching his rested muscles, arms extended back, legs tensed, he froze, looking up\u2014for the first time really seeing the ceiling. He turned his head, then rolled off the bed, wide awake.\n  This wasn't his room!\n \n \n The lawn outside wasn't part of the Reservation! Where the labs and the shops should have been, there was deep prairie grass, then a green ocean pushed into waves by the breeze stretching to the horizon. This wasn't the California desert! Down the hill, where the liquid oxygen plant ought to have been, a river wound across the scene, almost hidden beneath its leafy roof of huge ancient trees.\n \n Shock contracted Maitland's diaphragm and spread through his body. His breathing quickened. Now he remembered what had happened during the night, the sound in the darkness, the dimly seen figure, and then\u2014what? Blackout....\n \n Where was he? Who had brought him here? For what purpose?\n \n He thought he knew the answer to the last of those questions. As a member of the original atomic reaction-motor team, he possessed information that other military powers would very much like to obtain. It was absolutely incredible that anyone had managed to abduct him from the heavily guarded confines of the Reservation, yet someone had done it. How?\n \n \n\n \n He pivoted to inspect the room. Even before his eyes could take in the details, he had the impression that there was something wrong about it. To begin with, the style was unfamiliar. There were no straight lines or sharp corners anywhere. The walls were paneled in featureless blue plastic and the doors were smooth surfaces of metal, half ellipses, without knobs. The flowing lines of the chair and table, built apparently from an aluminum alloy, somehow gave the impression of arrested motion. Even after allowances were made for the outlandish design, something about the room still was not right.\n \n His eyes returned to the doors, and he moved over to study the nearer one. As he had noticed, there was no knob, but at the right of this one, at about waist level, a push-button projected out of the wall. He pressed it; the door slid aside and disappeared. Maitland glanced in at the disclosed bathroom, then went over to look at the other door.\n \n There was no button beside this one, nor any other visible means of causing it to open.\n \n Baffled, he turned again and looked at the large open window\u2014and realized what it was that had made the room seem so queer.\n \n It did not look like a jail cell. There were no bars....\n \n Striding across the room, he lunged forward to peer out and violently banged his forehead. He staggered back, grimacing with pain, then reached forward cautious fingers and discovered a hard sheet of stuff so transparent that he had not even suspected its presence. Not glass! Glass was never this clear or strong. A plastic, no doubt, but one he hadn't heard of. Security sometimes had disadvantages.\n \n He looked out at the peaceful vista of river and prairie. The character of the sunlight seemed to indicate that it was afternoon. He became aware that he was hungry.\n \n Where the devil could this place be? And\u2014muscles tightened about his empty stomach\u2014what was in store for him here?\n \n He stood trembling, acutely conscious that he was afraid and helpless, until a flicker of motion at the bottom of the hill near the river drew his attention. Pressing his nose against the window, he strained his eyes to see what it was.\n \n A man and a woman were coming toward him up the hill. Evidently they had been swimming, for each had a towel; the man's was hung around his neck, and the woman was still drying her bobbed black hair.\n \n Maitland speculated on the possibility that this might be Sweden; he didn't know of any other country where public bathing at this time of year was customary. However, that prairie certainly didn't look Scandinavian....\n \n As they came closer, he saw that both of them had dark uniform suntans and showed striking muscular development, like persons who had trained for years with weights. They vanished below his field of view, presumably into the building.\n \n He sat down on the edge of the cot and glared helplessly at the floor.\n \n \n\n \n About half an hour later, the door he couldn't open slid aside into the wall. The man Maitland had seen outside, now clad in gray trunks and sandals, stood across the threshold looking in at him. Maitland stood up and stared back, conscious suddenly that in his rumpled pajamas he made an unimpressive figure.\n \n The fellow looked about forty-five. The first details Maitland noticed were the forehead, which was quite broad, and the calm, clear eyes. The dark hair, white at the temples, was combed back, still damp from swimming. Below, there was a wide mouth and a firm, rounded chin.\n \n This man was intelligent, Maitland decided, and extremely sure of himself.\n \n Somehow, the face didn't go with the rest of him. The man had the head of a thinker, the body of a trained athlete\u2014an unusual combination.\n \n Impassively, the man said, \"My name is Swarts. You want to know where you are. I am not going to tell you.\" He had an accent, European, but otherwise unidentifiable. Possibly German. Maitland opened his mouth to protest, but Swarts went on, \"However, you're free to do all the guessing you want.\" Still there was no suggestion of a smile.\n \n \"Now, these are the rules. You'll be here for about a week. You'll have three meals a day, served in this room. You will not be allowed to leave it except when accompanied by myself. You will not be harmed in any way, provided you cooperate. And you can forget the silly idea that we want your childish secrets about rocket motors.\" Maitland's heart jumped. \"My reason for bringing you here is altogether different. I want to give you some psychological tests....\"\n \n \"Are you crazy?\" Maitland asked quietly. \"Do you realize that at this moment one of the greatest hunts in history must be going on? I'll admit I'm baffled as to where we are and how you got me here\u2014but it seems to me that you could have found someone less conspicuous to give your tests to.\"\n \n Briefly, then, Swarts did smile. \"They won't find you,\" he said. \"Now, come with me.\"\n \n \n\n \n After that outlandish cell, Swarts' laboratory looked rather commonplace. There was something like a surgical cot in the center, and a bench along one wall supported several electronics cabinets. A couple of them had cathode ray tube screens, and they all presented a normal complement of meters, pilot lights, and switches. Cables from them ran across the ceiling and came to a focus above the high flat cot in the center of the room.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Swarts said. When Maitland hesitated, Swarts added,\n\"Understand one thing\u2014the more you cooperate, the easier things will be for you. If necessary, I will use coercion. I can get all my results against your will, if I must. I would prefer not to. Please don't make me.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" Maitland asked. \"What is all this?\"\n \n Swarts hesitated, though not, Maitland astonishedly felt, to evade an answer, but to find the proper words. \"You can think of it as a lie detector. These instruments will record your reactions to the tests I give you. That is as much as you need to know. Now lie down.\"\n \n Maitland stood there for a moment, deliberately relaxing his tensed muscles. \"Make me.\"\n \n If Swarts was irritated, he didn't show it. \"That was the first test,\" he said. \"Let me put it another way. I would appreciate it a lot if you'd lie down on this cot. I would like to test my apparatus.\"\n \n Maitland shook his head stubbornly.\n \n \"I see,\" Swarts said. \"You want to find out what you're up against.\"\n \n He moved so fast that Maitland couldn't block the blow. It was to the solar plexus, just hard enough to double him up, fighting for breath. He felt an arm under his back, another behind his knees. Then he was on the cot. When he was able to breathe again, there were straps across his chest, hips, knees, ankles, and arms, and Swarts was tightening a clamp that held his head immovable.\n \n \n\n \n Presently, a number of tiny electrodes were adhering to his temples and to other portions of his body, and a minute microphone was clinging to the skin over his heart. These devices terminated in cables that hung from the ceiling. A sphygmomanometer sleeve was wrapped tightly around his left upper arm, its rubber tube trailing to a small black box clamped to the frame of the cot. Another cable left the box and joined the others.\n \n So\u2014Maitland thought\u2014Swarts could record changes in his skin potential, heartbeat, and blood pressure: the involuntary responses of the body to stimuli.\n \n The question was, what were the stimuli to be?\n \n \"Your name,\" said Swarts, \"is Robert Lee Maitland. You are thirty-four years old. You are an engineer, specialty heat transfer, particularly as applied to rocket motors.... No, Mr. Maitland, I'm not going to question you about your work; just forget about it. Your home town is Madison, Wisconsin....\"\n \n \"You seem to know everything about me,\" Maitland said defiantly, looking up into the hanging forest of cabling. \"Why this recital?\"\n \n \"I do not know everything about you\u2014yet. And I'm testing the equipment, calibrating it to your reactions.\" He went on, \"Your favorite recreations are chess and reading what you term science fiction. Maitland, how would you like to go to the Moon ?\"\n \n Something eager leaped in Maitland's breast at the abrupt question, and he tried to turn his head. Then he forced himself to relax. \"What do you mean?\"\n \n Swarts was chuckling. \"I really hit a semantic push-button there, didn't I? Maitland, I brought you here because you're a man who wants to go to the Moon. I'm interested in finding out why .\"\n \n \n\n \n In the evening a girl brought Maitland his meal. As the door slid aside, he automatically stood up, and they stared at each other for several seconds.\n \n She had the high cheekbones and almond eyes of an Oriental, skin that glowed like gold in the evening light, yet thick coiled braids of blonde hair that glittered like polished brass. Shorts and a sleeveless blouse of some thick, reddish, metallic-looking fabric clung to her body, and over that she was wearing a light, ankle-length cloak of what seemed to be white wool.\n \n She was looking at him with palpable curiosity and something like expectancy. Maitland sighed and said, \"Hello,\" then glanced down self-consciously at his wrinkled green pajamas.\n \n \n\n \n She smiled, put the tray of food on the table, and swept out, her cloak billowing behind her. Maitland remained standing, staring at the closed door for a minute after she was gone.\n \n Later, when he had finished the steak and corn on the cob and shredded carrots, and a feeling of warm well-being was diffusing from his stomach to his extremities, he sat down on the bed to watch the sunset and to think.\n \n There were three questions for which he required answers before he could formulate any plan or policy.\n \n Where was he?\n \n Who was Swarts?\n \n What was the purpose of the \"tests\" he was being given?\n \n It was possible, of course, that this was all an elaborate scheme for getting military secrets, despite Swarts' protestations to the contrary. Maitland frowned. This place certainly didn't have the appearance of a military establishment, and so far there had been nothing to suggest the kind of interrogation to be expected from foreign intelligence officers.\n \n It might be better to tackle the first question first. He looked at the Sun, a red spheroid already half below the horizon, and tried to think of a region that had this kind of terrain. That prairie out there was unique. Almost anywhere in the world, land like that would be cultivated, not allowed to go to grass.\n \n This might be somewhere in Africa....\n \n He shook his head, puzzled. The Sun disappeared and its blood-hued glow began to fade from the sky. Maitland sat there, trying to get hold of the problem from an angle where it wouldn't just slip away. After a while the western sky became a screen of clear luminous blue, a backdrop for a pure white brilliant star. As always at that sight, Maitland felt his worry drain away, leaving an almost mystical sense of peace and an undefinable longing.\n \n Venus, the most beautiful of the planets.\n \n Maitland kept track of them all in their majestic paths through the constellations, but Venus was his favorite. Time and time again he had watched its steady climb higher and higher in the western sky, its transient rule there as evening star, its progression toward the horizon, and loved it equally in its alter ego of morning star. Venus was an old friend. An old friend....\n \n Something icy settled on the back of his neck, ran down his spine, and diffused into his body. He stared at the planet unbelievingly, fists clenched, forgetting to breathe.\n \n Last night Venus hadn't been there.\n \n Venus was a morning star just now....\n  Just now!\n \n \n He realized the truth in that moment.\n \n \n\n \n Later, when that jewel of a planet had set and the stars were out, he lay on the bed, still warm with excitement and relief. He didn't have to worry any more about military secrets, or who Swarts was. Those questions were irrelevant now. And now he could accept the psychological tests at their face value; most likely, they were what they purported to be.\n \n Only one question of importance remained:\n \n What year was this?\n \n He grimaced in the darkness, an involuntary muscular expression of jubilation and excitement. The future ! Here was the opportunity for the greatest adventure imaginable to 20th Century man.\n \n Somewhere, out there under the stars, there must be grand glittering cities and busy spaceports, roaring gateways to the planets. Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus\u2014somewhere, perhaps, men who had visited the distant luring stars and returned. Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars!\n \n And he had a chance to become a part of all that! He could spend his life among the planets, a citizen of deep space, a voyager of the challenging spaceways between the solar worlds.\n \n \"I'm adaptable,\" he told himself gleefully. \"I can learn fast. There'll be a job for me out there....\"\n  If\u2014\n \n \n Suddenly sobered, he rolled over and put his feet on the floor, sat in the darkness thinking. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would have to find a way of breaking down Swarts' reticence. He would have to make the man realize that secrecy wasn't necessary in this case. And if Swarts still wouldn't talk, he would have to find a way of forcing the issue. The fellow had said that he didn't need cooperation to get his results, but\u2014\n \n After a while Maitland smiled to himself and went back to bed.\n \n \n\n \n He woke in the morning with someone gently shaking his shoulder. He rolled over and looked up at the girl who had brought him his meal the evening before. There was a tray on the table and he sniffed the smell of bacon. The girl smiled at him. She was dressed as before, except that she had discarded the white cloak.\n \n As he swung his legs to the floor, she started toward the door, carrying the tray with the dirty dishes from yesterday. He stopped her with the word, \"Miss!\"\n \n She turned, and he thought there was something eager in her face.\n \n \"Miss, do you speak my language?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" hesitantly. She lingered too long on the hiss of the last consonant.\n \n \"Miss,\" he asked, watching her face intently, \"what year is this?\"\n \n Startlingly, she laughed, a mellow peal of mirth that had nothing forced about it. She turned toward the door again and said over her shoulder, \"You will have to ask Swarts about that. I cannot tell you.\"\n \n \"Wait! You mean you don't know?\"\n \n She shook her head. \"I cannot tell you.\"\n \n \"All right; we'll let it go at that.\"\n \n She grinned at him again as the door slid shut.\n \n \n\n \n Swarts came half an hour later, and Maitland began his planned offensive.\n \n \"What year is this?\"\n \n Swarts' steely eyes locked with his. \"You know what the date is,\" he stated.\n \n \"No, I don't. Not since yesterday.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Swarts said patiently, \"let's get going. We have a lot to get through this morning.\"\n \n \"I know this isn't 1950. It's probably not even the 20th Century. Venus was a morning star before you brought me here. Now it's an evening star.\"\n \n \"Never mind that. Come.\"\n \n Wordlessly, Maitland climbed to his feet, preceded Swarts to the laboratory, lay down and allowed him to fasten the straps and attach the instruments, making no resistance at all. When Swarts started saying a list of words\u2014doubtlessly some sort of semantic reaction test\u2014Maitland began the job of integrating \"csc\n 3\n x dx\" in his head. It was a calculation which required great concentration and frequent tracing back of steps. After several minutes, he noticed that Swarts had stopped calling words. He opened his eyes to find the other man standing over him, looking somewhat exasperated and a little baffled.\n \n \"What year is this?\" Maitland asked in a conversational tone.\n \n \"We'll try another series of tests.\"\n \n It took Swarts nearly twenty minutes to set up the new apparatus. He lowered a bulky affair with two cylindrical tubes like the twin stacks of a binocular microscope over Maitland's head, so that the lenses at the ends of the tubes were about half an inch from the engineer's eyes. He attached tiny clamps to Maitland's eyelashes.\n \n \"These will keep you from holding your eyes shut,\" he said. \"You can blink, but the springs are too strong for you to hold your eyelids down against the tension.\"\n \n He inserted button earphones into Maitland's ears\u2014\n \n And then the show began.\n \n He was looking at a door in a partly darkened room, and there were footsteps outside, a peremptory knocking. The door flew open, and outlined against the light of the hall, he saw a man with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The man shouted, \"Now I've got you, you wife-stealer!\" He swung the shotgun around and pulled the trigger. There was a terrible blast of sound and the flash of smokeless powder\u2014then blackness.\n \n With a deliberate effort, Maitland unclenched his fists and tried to slow his breathing. Some kind of emotional reaction test\u2014what was the countermove? He closed his eyes, but shortly the muscles around them declared excruciatingly that they couldn't keep that up.\n \n Now he was looking at a girl. She....\n \n Maitland gritted his teeth and fought to use his brain; then he had it.\n \n He thought of a fat slob of a bully who had beaten him up one day after school. He remembered a talk he had heard by a politician who had all the intelligent social responsibility of a rogue gorilla, but no more. He brooded over the damnable stupidity and short-sightedness of Swarts in standing by his silly rules and not telling him about this new world.\n \n Within a minute, he was in an ungovernable rage. His muscles tightened against the restraining straps. He panted, sweat came out on his forehead, and he began to curse. Swarts! How he hated....\n \n The scene was suddenly a flock of sheep spread over a green hillside. There was blood hammering in Maitland's temples. His face felt hot and swollen and he writhed against the restraint of the straps.\n \n The scene disappeared, the lenses of the projector retreated from his eyes and Swarts was standing over him, white-lipped. Maitland swore at him for a few seconds, then relaxed and smiled weakly. His head was starting to ache from the effort of blinking.\n \n \"What year is this?\" he asked.\n \n \"All right,\" Swarts said. \"A.D. 2634.\"\n \n Maitland's smile became a grin.\n \n \n\n \n \"I really haven't the time to waste talking irrelevancies,\" Swarts said a while later. \"Honestly. Maitland, I'm working against a time limit. If you'll cooperate, I'll tell Ching to answer your questions.\"'\n \n \"Ching?\"\n \n \"Ingrid Ching is the girl who has been bringing you your meals.\"\n \n Maitland considered a moment, then nodded. Swarts lowered the projector to his eyes again, and this time the engineer did not resist.\n \n That evening, he could hardly wait for her to come. Too excited to sit and watch the sunset, he paced interminably about the room, sometimes whistling nervously, snapping his fingers, sitting down and jittering one leg. After a while he noticed that he was whistling the same theme over and over: a minute's thought identified it as that exuberant mounting phrase which recurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.\n \n He forgot about it and went on whistling. He was picturing himself aboard a ship dropping in toward Mars, making planetfall at Syrtis Major; he was seeing visions of Venus and the awesome beauty of Saturn. In his mind, he circled the Moon, and viewed the Earth as a huge bright globe against the constellations....\n \n Finally the door slid aside and she appeared, carrying the usual tray of food. She smiled at him, making dimples in her golden skin and revealing a perfect set of teeth, and put the tray on the table.\n \n \"I think you are wonderful,\" she laughed. \"You get everything you want, even from Swarts, and I have not been able to get even a little of what I want from him. I want to travel in time, go back to your 20th Century. And I wanted to talk with you, and he would not let me.\" She laughed again, hands on her rounded hips. \"I have never seen him so irritated as he was this noon.\"\n \n Maitland urged her into the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eagerly he asked, \"Why the devil do you want to go to the 20th Century? Believe me, I've been there, and what I've seen of this world looks a lot better.\"\n \n She shrugged. \"Swarts says that I want to go back to the Dark Age of Technology because I have not adapted well to modern culture. Myself, I think I have just a romantic nature. Far times and places look more exciting....\"\n \n \"How do you mean\u2014\" Maitland wrinkled his brow\u2014\"adapt to modern culture? Don't tell me you're from another time!\"\n \n \"Oh, no! But my home is Aresund, a little fishing village at the head of a fiord in what you would call Norway. So far north, we are much behind the times. We live in the old way, from the sea, speak the old tongue.\"\n \n \n\n \n He looked at her golden features, such a felicitous blend of Oriental and European characteristics, and hesitantly asked, \"Maybe I shouldn't.... This is a little personal, but ... you don't look altogether like the Norwegians of my time.\"\n \n His fear that she would be offended proved to be completely unjustified. She merely laughed and said, \"There has been much history since 1950. Five hundred years ago, Europe was overrun by Pan-Orientals. Today you could not find anywhere a 'pure' European or Asiatic.\" She giggled. \"Swarts' ancestors from your time must be cursing in their graves. His family is Afrikander all the way back, but one of his great-grandfathers was pure-blooded Bantu. His full name is Lassisi Swarts.\"\n \n Maitland wrinkled his brow. \"Afrikander?\"\n \n \"The South Africans.\" Something strange came into her eyes. It might have been awe, or even hatred; he could not tell. \"The Pan-Orientals eventually conquered all the world, except for North America\u2014the last remnant of the American World Empire\u2014and southern Africa. The Afrikanders had been partly isolated for several centuries then, and they had developed technology while the rest of the world lost it. They had a tradition of white supremacy, and in addition they were terrified of being encircled.\" She sighed. \"They ruled the next world empire and it was founded on the slaughter of one and a half billion human beings. That went into the history books as the War of Annihilation.\"\n \n \"So many? How?\"\n \n \"They were clever with machines, the Afrikanders. They made armies of them. Armies of invincible killing-machines, produced in robot factories from robot-mined ores.... Very clever.\" She gave a little shudder.\n \n \"And yet they founded modern civilization,\" she added. \"The grandsons of the technicians who built the Machine Army set up our robot production system, and today no human being has to dirty his hands raising food or manufacturing things. It could never have been done, either, before the population was\u2014reduced to three hundred million.\"\n \n \"Then the Afrikanders are still on top? Still the masters?\"\n \n \n\n \n She shook her head. \"There are no more Afrikanders.\"\n \n \"Rebellion?\"\n \n \"No. Intermarriage. Racial blending. There was a psychology of guilt behind it. So huge a crime eventually required a proportionate expiation. Afrikaans is still the world language, but there is only one race now. No more masters or slaves.\"\n \n They were both silent for a moment, and then she sighed. \"Let us not talk about them any more.\"\n \n \"Robot factories and farms,\" Maitland mused. \"What else? What means of transportation? Do you have interstellar flight yet?\"\n \n \"Inter-what?\"\n \n \"Have men visited the stars?\"\n \n She shook her head, bewildered.\n \n \"I always thought that would be a tough problem to crack,\" he agreed.\n\"But tell me about what men are doing in the Solar System. How is life on Mars and Venus, and how long does it take to get to those places?\"\n \n He waited, expectantly silent, but she only looked puzzled. \"I don't understand. Mars? What are Mars?\"\n \n After several seconds, Maitland swallowed. Something seemed to be the matter with his throat, making it difficult for him to speak. \"Surely you have space travel?\"\n \n She frowned and shook her head. \"What does that mean\u2014space travel?\"\n \n He was gripping the edge of the bed now, glaring at her. \"A civilization that could discover time travel and build robot factories wouldn't find it hard to send a ship to Mars!\"\n \n \"A ship ? Oh, you mean something like a vliegvlotter . Why, no, I don't suppose it would be hard. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?\"\n \n He was on his feet towering over her, fists clenched. She raised her arms as if to shield her face if he should hit her. \"Let's get this perfectly clear,\" he said, more harshly than he realized. \"So far as you know, no one has ever visited the planets, and no one wants to. Is that right?\"\n \n She nodded apprehensively. \"I have never heard of it being done.\"\n \n He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After a while he looked up and said bitterly, \"You're looking at a man who would give his life to get to Mars. I thought I would in my time. I was positive I would when I knew I was in your time. And now I know I never will.\"\n \n \n\n \n The cot creaked beside him and he felt a soft arm about his shoulders and fingers delicately stroking his brow. Presently he opened his eyes and looked at her. \"I just don't understand,\" he said. \"It seemed obvious to me that whenever men were able to reach the planets, they'd do it.\"\n \n Her pitying eyes were on his face. He hitched himself around so that he was facing her. \"I've got to understand. I've got to know why . What happened? Why don't men want the planets any more?\"\n \n \"Honestly,\" she said, \"I did not know they ever had.\" She hesitated.\n\"Maybe you are asking the wrong question.\"\n \n He furrowed his brow, bewildered now by her.\n \n \"I mean,\" she explained, \"maybe you should ask why people in the 20th Century did want to go to worlds men are not suited to inhabit.\"\n \n Maitland felt his face become hot. \"Men can go anywhere, if they want to bad enough.\"\n \n \"But why ?\"\n \n Despite his sudden irrational anger toward her, Maitland tried to stick to logic. \"Living space, for one thing. The only permanent solution to the population problem....\"\n \n \"We have no population problem. A hundred years ago, we realized that the key to social stability is a limited population. Our economic system was built to take care of three hundred million people, and we have held the number at that.\"\n \n \"Birth control,\" Maitland scoffed. \"How do you make it work\u2014secret police?\"\n \n \"No. Education. Each of us has the right to two children, and we cherish that right so much that we make every effort to see that those two are the best children we could possibly produce....\"\n \n She broke off, looking a little self-conscious. \"You understand, what I have been saying applies to most of the world. In some places like Aresund, things are different. Backward. I still do not feel that I belong here, although the people of the town have accepted me as one of them.\"\n \n \"Even,\" he said, \"granting that you have solved the population problem, there's still the adventure of the thing. Surely, somewhere, there must be men who still feel that.... Ingrid, doesn't it fire something in your blood, the idea of going to Mars\u2014just to go there and see what's there and walk under a new sky and a smaller Sun? Aren't you interested in finding out what the canals are? Or what's under the clouds of Venus? Wouldn't you like to see the rings of Saturn from, a distance of only two hundred thousand miles?\" His hands were trembling as he stopped.\n \n She shrugged her shapely shoulders. \"Go into the past\u2014yes! But go out there? I still cannot see why.\"\n \n \"Has the spirit of adventure evaporated from the human race, or what ?\"\n \n She smiled. \"In a room downstairs there is the head of a lion. Swarts killed the beast when he was a young man. He used a spear. And time traveling is the greatest adventure there is. At least, that is the way I feel. Listen, Bob.\" She laid a hand on his arm. \"You grew up in the Age of Technology. Everybody was terribly excited about what could be done with machines\u2014machines to blow up a city all at once, or fly around the world, or take a man to Mars. We have had our fill of\u2014what is the word?\u2014gadgets. Our machines serve us, and so long as they function right, we are satisfied to forget about them.\n \n \"Because this is the Age of Man . We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists, like Swarts, are studying human rather than nuclear reactions. We are much more fascinated by the life and death of cultures than by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. With us, it is the people that are important, not gadgets.\"\n \n Maitland stared at her, his face blank. His mind had just manufactured a discouraging analogy. His present position was like that of an earnest 12th Century crusader, deposited by some freak of nature into the year 1950, trying to find a way of reanimating the anti-Mohammedan movement. What chance would he have? The unfortunate knight would argue in vain that the atomic bomb offered a means of finally destroying the infidel....\n \n Maitland looked up at the girl, who was regarding him silently with troubled eyes. \"I think I'd like to be alone for a while,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of space in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31989, "query_start_index": 31991, "query_end_index": 32048, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Space is very significant in the story. Maitland is a man who wishes to one day travel to mars. Swarts asks him if he wants to go to the moon. The reasoning behind Swarts testing Maitland is in an effort to discover why someone from the 20th century would want to go to the moon at all. In the year 2634, they have no interest or need for space travel. Ching doesn't even know what Mars is. They have the capability to travel to space, but don't care to. Their population is only 300 million, meaning that they're not going to run out of resources or space on Earth. They also see no need to travel to space in the name of adventure, as they have time travel, which according to Ching, is the greatest adventure of all. Maitland is devastated to discover that he will not travel to space. He wants to see the sun as a smaller star on mars, he wants to walk on Venus, he wants to see the rings of Saturn from only 200,000 miles away."}
{"id": "51274_3", "pid": "51274_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nAMBITION\n \n \n By WILLIAM L. BADE\n \n Illustrated by L. WOROMAY\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction October 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n\n To the men of the future, the scientific goals of today were as incomprehensible as the ancient quest for the Holy Grail!\n \n \n \n There was a thump. Maitland stirred, came half awake, and opened his eyes. The room was dark except where a broad shaft of moonlight from the open window fell on the foot of his bed. Outside, the residential section of the Reservation slept silently under the pale illumination of the full Moon. He guessed sleepily that it was about three o'clock.\n \n What had he heard? He had a definite impression that the sound had come from within the room. It had sounded like someone stumbling into a chair, or\u2014\n \n Something moved in the darkness on the other side of the room. Maitland started to sit up and it was as though a thousand volts had shorted his brain....\n \n This time, he awoke more normally. He opened his eyes, looked through the window at a section of azure sky, listened to the singing of birds somewhere outside. A beautiful day. In the middle of the process of stretching his rested muscles, arms extended back, legs tensed, he froze, looking up\u2014for the first time really seeing the ceiling. He turned his head, then rolled off the bed, wide awake.\n  This wasn't his room!\n \n \n The lawn outside wasn't part of the Reservation! Where the labs and the shops should have been, there was deep prairie grass, then a green ocean pushed into waves by the breeze stretching to the horizon. This wasn't the California desert! Down the hill, where the liquid oxygen plant ought to have been, a river wound across the scene, almost hidden beneath its leafy roof of huge ancient trees.\n \n Shock contracted Maitland's diaphragm and spread through his body. His breathing quickened. Now he remembered what had happened during the night, the sound in the darkness, the dimly seen figure, and then\u2014what? Blackout....\n \n Where was he? Who had brought him here? For what purpose?\n \n He thought he knew the answer to the last of those questions. As a member of the original atomic reaction-motor team, he possessed information that other military powers would very much like to obtain. It was absolutely incredible that anyone had managed to abduct him from the heavily guarded confines of the Reservation, yet someone had done it. How?\n \n \n\n \n He pivoted to inspect the room. Even before his eyes could take in the details, he had the impression that there was something wrong about it. To begin with, the style was unfamiliar. There were no straight lines or sharp corners anywhere. The walls were paneled in featureless blue plastic and the doors were smooth surfaces of metal, half ellipses, without knobs. The flowing lines of the chair and table, built apparently from an aluminum alloy, somehow gave the impression of arrested motion. Even after allowances were made for the outlandish design, something about the room still was not right.\n \n His eyes returned to the doors, and he moved over to study the nearer one. As he had noticed, there was no knob, but at the right of this one, at about waist level, a push-button projected out of the wall. He pressed it; the door slid aside and disappeared. Maitland glanced in at the disclosed bathroom, then went over to look at the other door.\n \n There was no button beside this one, nor any other visible means of causing it to open.\n \n Baffled, he turned again and looked at the large open window\u2014and realized what it was that had made the room seem so queer.\n \n It did not look like a jail cell. There were no bars....\n \n Striding across the room, he lunged forward to peer out and violently banged his forehead. He staggered back, grimacing with pain, then reached forward cautious fingers and discovered a hard sheet of stuff so transparent that he had not even suspected its presence. Not glass! Glass was never this clear or strong. A plastic, no doubt, but one he hadn't heard of. Security sometimes had disadvantages.\n \n He looked out at the peaceful vista of river and prairie. The character of the sunlight seemed to indicate that it was afternoon. He became aware that he was hungry.\n \n Where the devil could this place be? And\u2014muscles tightened about his empty stomach\u2014what was in store for him here?\n \n He stood trembling, acutely conscious that he was afraid and helpless, until a flicker of motion at the bottom of the hill near the river drew his attention. Pressing his nose against the window, he strained his eyes to see what it was.\n \n A man and a woman were coming toward him up the hill. Evidently they had been swimming, for each had a towel; the man's was hung around his neck, and the woman was still drying her bobbed black hair.\n \n Maitland speculated on the possibility that this might be Sweden; he didn't know of any other country where public bathing at this time of year was customary. However, that prairie certainly didn't look Scandinavian....\n \n As they came closer, he saw that both of them had dark uniform suntans and showed striking muscular development, like persons who had trained for years with weights. They vanished below his field of view, presumably into the building.\n \n He sat down on the edge of the cot and glared helplessly at the floor.\n \n \n\n \n About half an hour later, the door he couldn't open slid aside into the wall. The man Maitland had seen outside, now clad in gray trunks and sandals, stood across the threshold looking in at him. Maitland stood up and stared back, conscious suddenly that in his rumpled pajamas he made an unimpressive figure.\n \n The fellow looked about forty-five. The first details Maitland noticed were the forehead, which was quite broad, and the calm, clear eyes. The dark hair, white at the temples, was combed back, still damp from swimming. Below, there was a wide mouth and a firm, rounded chin.\n \n This man was intelligent, Maitland decided, and extremely sure of himself.\n \n Somehow, the face didn't go with the rest of him. The man had the head of a thinker, the body of a trained athlete\u2014an unusual combination.\n \n Impassively, the man said, \"My name is Swarts. You want to know where you are. I am not going to tell you.\" He had an accent, European, but otherwise unidentifiable. Possibly German. Maitland opened his mouth to protest, but Swarts went on, \"However, you're free to do all the guessing you want.\" Still there was no suggestion of a smile.\n \n \"Now, these are the rules. You'll be here for about a week. You'll have three meals a day, served in this room. You will not be allowed to leave it except when accompanied by myself. You will not be harmed in any way, provided you cooperate. And you can forget the silly idea that we want your childish secrets about rocket motors.\" Maitland's heart jumped. \"My reason for bringing you here is altogether different. I want to give you some psychological tests....\"\n \n \"Are you crazy?\" Maitland asked quietly. \"Do you realize that at this moment one of the greatest hunts in history must be going on? I'll admit I'm baffled as to where we are and how you got me here\u2014but it seems to me that you could have found someone less conspicuous to give your tests to.\"\n \n Briefly, then, Swarts did smile. \"They won't find you,\" he said. \"Now, come with me.\"\n \n \n\n \n After that outlandish cell, Swarts' laboratory looked rather commonplace. There was something like a surgical cot in the center, and a bench along one wall supported several electronics cabinets. A couple of them had cathode ray tube screens, and they all presented a normal complement of meters, pilot lights, and switches. Cables from them ran across the ceiling and came to a focus above the high flat cot in the center of the room.\n \n \"Lie down,\" Swarts said. When Maitland hesitated, Swarts added,\n\"Understand one thing\u2014the more you cooperate, the easier things will be for you. If necessary, I will use coercion. I can get all my results against your will, if I must. I would prefer not to. Please don't make me.\"\n \n \"What's the idea?\" Maitland asked. \"What is all this?\"\n \n Swarts hesitated, though not, Maitland astonishedly felt, to evade an answer, but to find the proper words. \"You can think of it as a lie detector. These instruments will record your reactions to the tests I give you. That is as much as you need to know. Now lie down.\"\n \n Maitland stood there for a moment, deliberately relaxing his tensed muscles. \"Make me.\"\n \n If Swarts was irritated, he didn't show it. \"That was the first test,\" he said. \"Let me put it another way. I would appreciate it a lot if you'd lie down on this cot. I would like to test my apparatus.\"\n \n Maitland shook his head stubbornly.\n \n \"I see,\" Swarts said. \"You want to find out what you're up against.\"\n \n He moved so fast that Maitland couldn't block the blow. It was to the solar plexus, just hard enough to double him up, fighting for breath. He felt an arm under his back, another behind his knees. Then he was on the cot. When he was able to breathe again, there were straps across his chest, hips, knees, ankles, and arms, and Swarts was tightening a clamp that held his head immovable.\n \n \n\n \n Presently, a number of tiny electrodes were adhering to his temples and to other portions of his body, and a minute microphone was clinging to the skin over his heart. These devices terminated in cables that hung from the ceiling. A sphygmomanometer sleeve was wrapped tightly around his left upper arm, its rubber tube trailing to a small black box clamped to the frame of the cot. Another cable left the box and joined the others.\n \n So\u2014Maitland thought\u2014Swarts could record changes in his skin potential, heartbeat, and blood pressure: the involuntary responses of the body to stimuli.\n \n The question was, what were the stimuli to be?\n \n \"Your name,\" said Swarts, \"is Robert Lee Maitland. You are thirty-four years old. You are an engineer, specialty heat transfer, particularly as applied to rocket motors.... No, Mr. Maitland, I'm not going to question you about your work; just forget about it. Your home town is Madison, Wisconsin....\"\n \n \"You seem to know everything about me,\" Maitland said defiantly, looking up into the hanging forest of cabling. \"Why this recital?\"\n \n \"I do not know everything about you\u2014yet. And I'm testing the equipment, calibrating it to your reactions.\" He went on, \"Your favorite recreations are chess and reading what you term science fiction. Maitland, how would you like to go to the Moon ?\"\n \n Something eager leaped in Maitland's breast at the abrupt question, and he tried to turn his head. Then he forced himself to relax. \"What do you mean?\"\n \n Swarts was chuckling. \"I really hit a semantic push-button there, didn't I? Maitland, I brought you here because you're a man who wants to go to the Moon. I'm interested in finding out why .\"\n \n \n\n \n In the evening a girl brought Maitland his meal. As the door slid aside, he automatically stood up, and they stared at each other for several seconds.\n \n She had the high cheekbones and almond eyes of an Oriental, skin that glowed like gold in the evening light, yet thick coiled braids of blonde hair that glittered like polished brass. Shorts and a sleeveless blouse of some thick, reddish, metallic-looking fabric clung to her body, and over that she was wearing a light, ankle-length cloak of what seemed to be white wool.\n \n She was looking at him with palpable curiosity and something like expectancy. Maitland sighed and said, \"Hello,\" then glanced down self-consciously at his wrinkled green pajamas.\n \n \n\n \n She smiled, put the tray of food on the table, and swept out, her cloak billowing behind her. Maitland remained standing, staring at the closed door for a minute after she was gone.\n \n Later, when he had finished the steak and corn on the cob and shredded carrots, and a feeling of warm well-being was diffusing from his stomach to his extremities, he sat down on the bed to watch the sunset and to think.\n \n There were three questions for which he required answers before he could formulate any plan or policy.\n \n Where was he?\n \n Who was Swarts?\n \n What was the purpose of the \"tests\" he was being given?\n \n It was possible, of course, that this was all an elaborate scheme for getting military secrets, despite Swarts' protestations to the contrary. Maitland frowned. This place certainly didn't have the appearance of a military establishment, and so far there had been nothing to suggest the kind of interrogation to be expected from foreign intelligence officers.\n \n It might be better to tackle the first question first. He looked at the Sun, a red spheroid already half below the horizon, and tried to think of a region that had this kind of terrain. That prairie out there was unique. Almost anywhere in the world, land like that would be cultivated, not allowed to go to grass.\n \n This might be somewhere in Africa....\n \n He shook his head, puzzled. The Sun disappeared and its blood-hued glow began to fade from the sky. Maitland sat there, trying to get hold of the problem from an angle where it wouldn't just slip away. After a while the western sky became a screen of clear luminous blue, a backdrop for a pure white brilliant star. As always at that sight, Maitland felt his worry drain away, leaving an almost mystical sense of peace and an undefinable longing.\n \n Venus, the most beautiful of the planets.\n \n Maitland kept track of them all in their majestic paths through the constellations, but Venus was his favorite. Time and time again he had watched its steady climb higher and higher in the western sky, its transient rule there as evening star, its progression toward the horizon, and loved it equally in its alter ego of morning star. Venus was an old friend. An old friend....\n \n Something icy settled on the back of his neck, ran down his spine, and diffused into his body. He stared at the planet unbelievingly, fists clenched, forgetting to breathe.\n \n Last night Venus hadn't been there.\n \n Venus was a morning star just now....\n  Just now!\n \n \n He realized the truth in that moment.\n \n \n\n \n Later, when that jewel of a planet had set and the stars were out, he lay on the bed, still warm with excitement and relief. He didn't have to worry any more about military secrets, or who Swarts was. Those questions were irrelevant now. And now he could accept the psychological tests at their face value; most likely, they were what they purported to be.\n \n Only one question of importance remained:\n \n What year was this?\n \n He grimaced in the darkness, an involuntary muscular expression of jubilation and excitement. The future ! Here was the opportunity for the greatest adventure imaginable to 20th Century man.\n \n Somewhere, out there under the stars, there must be grand glittering cities and busy spaceports, roaring gateways to the planets. Somewhere, out there in the night, there must be men who had walked beside the Martian canals and pierced the shining cloud mantle of Venus\u2014somewhere, perhaps, men who had visited the distant luring stars and returned. Surely, a civilization that had developed time travel could reach the stars!\n \n And he had a chance to become a part of all that! He could spend his life among the planets, a citizen of deep space, a voyager of the challenging spaceways between the solar worlds.\n \n \"I'm adaptable,\" he told himself gleefully. \"I can learn fast. There'll be a job for me out there....\"\n  If\u2014\n \n \n Suddenly sobered, he rolled over and put his feet on the floor, sat in the darkness thinking. Tomorrow. Tomorrow he would have to find a way of breaking down Swarts' reticence. He would have to make the man realize that secrecy wasn't necessary in this case. And if Swarts still wouldn't talk, he would have to find a way of forcing the issue. The fellow had said that he didn't need cooperation to get his results, but\u2014\n \n After a while Maitland smiled to himself and went back to bed.\n \n \n\n \n He woke in the morning with someone gently shaking his shoulder. He rolled over and looked up at the girl who had brought him his meal the evening before. There was a tray on the table and he sniffed the smell of bacon. The girl smiled at him. She was dressed as before, except that she had discarded the white cloak.\n \n As he swung his legs to the floor, she started toward the door, carrying the tray with the dirty dishes from yesterday. He stopped her with the word, \"Miss!\"\n \n She turned, and he thought there was something eager in her face.\n \n \"Miss, do you speak my language?\"\n \n \"Yes,\" hesitantly. She lingered too long on the hiss of the last consonant.\n \n \"Miss,\" he asked, watching her face intently, \"what year is this?\"\n \n Startlingly, she laughed, a mellow peal of mirth that had nothing forced about it. She turned toward the door again and said over her shoulder, \"You will have to ask Swarts about that. I cannot tell you.\"\n \n \"Wait! You mean you don't know?\"\n \n She shook her head. \"I cannot tell you.\"\n \n \"All right; we'll let it go at that.\"\n \n She grinned at him again as the door slid shut.\n \n \n\n \n Swarts came half an hour later, and Maitland began his planned offensive.\n \n \"What year is this?\"\n \n Swarts' steely eyes locked with his. \"You know what the date is,\" he stated.\n \n \"No, I don't. Not since yesterday.\"\n \n \"Come on,\" Swarts said patiently, \"let's get going. We have a lot to get through this morning.\"\n \n \"I know this isn't 1950. It's probably not even the 20th Century. Venus was a morning star before you brought me here. Now it's an evening star.\"\n \n \"Never mind that. Come.\"\n \n Wordlessly, Maitland climbed to his feet, preceded Swarts to the laboratory, lay down and allowed him to fasten the straps and attach the instruments, making no resistance at all. When Swarts started saying a list of words\u2014doubtlessly some sort of semantic reaction test\u2014Maitland began the job of integrating \"csc\n 3\n x dx\" in his head. It was a calculation which required great concentration and frequent tracing back of steps. After several minutes, he noticed that Swarts had stopped calling words. He opened his eyes to find the other man standing over him, looking somewhat exasperated and a little baffled.\n \n \"What year is this?\" Maitland asked in a conversational tone.\n \n \"We'll try another series of tests.\"\n \n It took Swarts nearly twenty minutes to set up the new apparatus. He lowered a bulky affair with two cylindrical tubes like the twin stacks of a binocular microscope over Maitland's head, so that the lenses at the ends of the tubes were about half an inch from the engineer's eyes. He attached tiny clamps to Maitland's eyelashes.\n \n \"These will keep you from holding your eyes shut,\" he said. \"You can blink, but the springs are too strong for you to hold your eyelids down against the tension.\"\n \n He inserted button earphones into Maitland's ears\u2014\n \n And then the show began.\n \n He was looking at a door in a partly darkened room, and there were footsteps outside, a peremptory knocking. The door flew open, and outlined against the light of the hall, he saw a man with a twelve-gauge shotgun. The man shouted, \"Now I've got you, you wife-stealer!\" He swung the shotgun around and pulled the trigger. There was a terrible blast of sound and the flash of smokeless powder\u2014then blackness.\n \n With a deliberate effort, Maitland unclenched his fists and tried to slow his breathing. Some kind of emotional reaction test\u2014what was the countermove? He closed his eyes, but shortly the muscles around them declared excruciatingly that they couldn't keep that up.\n \n Now he was looking at a girl. She....\n \n Maitland gritted his teeth and fought to use his brain; then he had it.\n \n He thought of a fat slob of a bully who had beaten him up one day after school. He remembered a talk he had heard by a politician who had all the intelligent social responsibility of a rogue gorilla, but no more. He brooded over the damnable stupidity and short-sightedness of Swarts in standing by his silly rules and not telling him about this new world.\n \n Within a minute, he was in an ungovernable rage. His muscles tightened against the restraining straps. He panted, sweat came out on his forehead, and he began to curse. Swarts! How he hated....\n \n The scene was suddenly a flock of sheep spread over a green hillside. There was blood hammering in Maitland's temples. His face felt hot and swollen and he writhed against the restraint of the straps.\n \n The scene disappeared, the lenses of the projector retreated from his eyes and Swarts was standing over him, white-lipped. Maitland swore at him for a few seconds, then relaxed and smiled weakly. His head was starting to ache from the effort of blinking.\n \n \"What year is this?\" he asked.\n \n \"All right,\" Swarts said. \"A.D. 2634.\"\n \n Maitland's smile became a grin.\n \n \n\n \n \"I really haven't the time to waste talking irrelevancies,\" Swarts said a while later. \"Honestly. Maitland, I'm working against a time limit. If you'll cooperate, I'll tell Ching to answer your questions.\"'\n \n \"Ching?\"\n \n \"Ingrid Ching is the girl who has been bringing you your meals.\"\n \n Maitland considered a moment, then nodded. Swarts lowered the projector to his eyes again, and this time the engineer did not resist.\n \n That evening, he could hardly wait for her to come. Too excited to sit and watch the sunset, he paced interminably about the room, sometimes whistling nervously, snapping his fingers, sitting down and jittering one leg. After a while he noticed that he was whistling the same theme over and over: a minute's thought identified it as that exuberant mounting phrase which recurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.\n \n He forgot about it and went on whistling. He was picturing himself aboard a ship dropping in toward Mars, making planetfall at Syrtis Major; he was seeing visions of Venus and the awesome beauty of Saturn. In his mind, he circled the Moon, and viewed the Earth as a huge bright globe against the constellations....\n \n Finally the door slid aside and she appeared, carrying the usual tray of food. She smiled at him, making dimples in her golden skin and revealing a perfect set of teeth, and put the tray on the table.\n \n \"I think you are wonderful,\" she laughed. \"You get everything you want, even from Swarts, and I have not been able to get even a little of what I want from him. I want to travel in time, go back to your 20th Century. And I wanted to talk with you, and he would not let me.\" She laughed again, hands on her rounded hips. \"I have never seen him so irritated as he was this noon.\"\n \n Maitland urged her into the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed. Eagerly he asked, \"Why the devil do you want to go to the 20th Century? Believe me, I've been there, and what I've seen of this world looks a lot better.\"\n \n She shrugged. \"Swarts says that I want to go back to the Dark Age of Technology because I have not adapted well to modern culture. Myself, I think I have just a romantic nature. Far times and places look more exciting....\"\n \n \"How do you mean\u2014\" Maitland wrinkled his brow\u2014\"adapt to modern culture? Don't tell me you're from another time!\"\n \n \"Oh, no! But my home is Aresund, a little fishing village at the head of a fiord in what you would call Norway. So far north, we are much behind the times. We live in the old way, from the sea, speak the old tongue.\"\n \n \n\n \n He looked at her golden features, such a felicitous blend of Oriental and European characteristics, and hesitantly asked, \"Maybe I shouldn't.... This is a little personal, but ... you don't look altogether like the Norwegians of my time.\"\n \n His fear that she would be offended proved to be completely unjustified. She merely laughed and said, \"There has been much history since 1950. Five hundred years ago, Europe was overrun by Pan-Orientals. Today you could not find anywhere a 'pure' European or Asiatic.\" She giggled. \"Swarts' ancestors from your time must be cursing in their graves. His family is Afrikander all the way back, but one of his great-grandfathers was pure-blooded Bantu. His full name is Lassisi Swarts.\"\n \n Maitland wrinkled his brow. \"Afrikander?\"\n \n \"The South Africans.\" Something strange came into her eyes. It might have been awe, or even hatred; he could not tell. \"The Pan-Orientals eventually conquered all the world, except for North America\u2014the last remnant of the American World Empire\u2014and southern Africa. The Afrikanders had been partly isolated for several centuries then, and they had developed technology while the rest of the world lost it. They had a tradition of white supremacy, and in addition they were terrified of being encircled.\" She sighed. \"They ruled the next world empire and it was founded on the slaughter of one and a half billion human beings. That went into the history books as the War of Annihilation.\"\n \n \"So many? How?\"\n \n \"They were clever with machines, the Afrikanders. They made armies of them. Armies of invincible killing-machines, produced in robot factories from robot-mined ores.... Very clever.\" She gave a little shudder.\n \n \"And yet they founded modern civilization,\" she added. \"The grandsons of the technicians who built the Machine Army set up our robot production system, and today no human being has to dirty his hands raising food or manufacturing things. It could never have been done, either, before the population was\u2014reduced to three hundred million.\"\n \n \"Then the Afrikanders are still on top? Still the masters?\"\n \n \n\n \n She shook her head. \"There are no more Afrikanders.\"\n \n \"Rebellion?\"\n \n \"No. Intermarriage. Racial blending. There was a psychology of guilt behind it. So huge a crime eventually required a proportionate expiation. Afrikaans is still the world language, but there is only one race now. No more masters or slaves.\"\n \n They were both silent for a moment, and then she sighed. \"Let us not talk about them any more.\"\n \n \"Robot factories and farms,\" Maitland mused. \"What else? What means of transportation? Do you have interstellar flight yet?\"\n \n \"Inter-what?\"\n \n \"Have men visited the stars?\"\n \n She shook her head, bewildered.\n \n \"I always thought that would be a tough problem to crack,\" he agreed.\n\"But tell me about what men are doing in the Solar System. How is life on Mars and Venus, and how long does it take to get to those places?\"\n \n He waited, expectantly silent, but she only looked puzzled. \"I don't understand. Mars? What are Mars?\"\n \n After several seconds, Maitland swallowed. Something seemed to be the matter with his throat, making it difficult for him to speak. \"Surely you have space travel?\"\n \n She frowned and shook her head. \"What does that mean\u2014space travel?\"\n \n He was gripping the edge of the bed now, glaring at her. \"A civilization that could discover time travel and build robot factories wouldn't find it hard to send a ship to Mars!\"\n \n \"A ship ? Oh, you mean something like a vliegvlotter . Why, no, I don't suppose it would be hard. But why would anyone want to do a thing like that?\"\n \n He was on his feet towering over her, fists clenched. She raised her arms as if to shield her face if he should hit her. \"Let's get this perfectly clear,\" he said, more harshly than he realized. \"So far as you know, no one has ever visited the planets, and no one wants to. Is that right?\"\n \n She nodded apprehensively. \"I have never heard of it being done.\"\n \n He sank down on the bed and put his face in his hands. After a while he looked up and said bitterly, \"You're looking at a man who would give his life to get to Mars. I thought I would in my time. I was positive I would when I knew I was in your time. And now I know I never will.\"\n \n \n\n \n The cot creaked beside him and he felt a soft arm about his shoulders and fingers delicately stroking his brow. Presently he opened his eyes and looked at her. \"I just don't understand,\" he said. \"It seemed obvious to me that whenever men were able to reach the planets, they'd do it.\"\n \n Her pitying eyes were on his face. He hitched himself around so that he was facing her. \"I've got to understand. I've got to know why . What happened? Why don't men want the planets any more?\"\n \n \"Honestly,\" she said, \"I did not know they ever had.\" She hesitated.\n\"Maybe you are asking the wrong question.\"\n \n He furrowed his brow, bewildered now by her.\n \n \"I mean,\" she explained, \"maybe you should ask why people in the 20th Century did want to go to worlds men are not suited to inhabit.\"\n \n Maitland felt his face become hot. \"Men can go anywhere, if they want to bad enough.\"\n \n \"But why ?\"\n \n Despite his sudden irrational anger toward her, Maitland tried to stick to logic. \"Living space, for one thing. The only permanent solution to the population problem....\"\n \n \"We have no population problem. A hundred years ago, we realized that the key to social stability is a limited population. Our economic system was built to take care of three hundred million people, and we have held the number at that.\"\n \n \"Birth control,\" Maitland scoffed. \"How do you make it work\u2014secret police?\"\n \n \"No. Education. Each of us has the right to two children, and we cherish that right so much that we make every effort to see that those two are the best children we could possibly produce....\"\n \n She broke off, looking a little self-conscious. \"You understand, what I have been saying applies to most of the world. In some places like Aresund, things are different. Backward. I still do not feel that I belong here, although the people of the town have accepted me as one of them.\"\n \n \"Even,\" he said, \"granting that you have solved the population problem, there's still the adventure of the thing. Surely, somewhere, there must be men who still feel that.... Ingrid, doesn't it fire something in your blood, the idea of going to Mars\u2014just to go there and see what's there and walk under a new sky and a smaller Sun? Aren't you interested in finding out what the canals are? Or what's under the clouds of Venus? Wouldn't you like to see the rings of Saturn from, a distance of only two hundred thousand miles?\" His hands were trembling as he stopped.\n \n She shrugged her shapely shoulders. \"Go into the past\u2014yes! But go out there? I still cannot see why.\"\n \n \"Has the spirit of adventure evaporated from the human race, or what ?\"\n \n She smiled. \"In a room downstairs there is the head of a lion. Swarts killed the beast when he was a young man. He used a spear. And time traveling is the greatest adventure there is. At least, that is the way I feel. Listen, Bob.\" She laid a hand on his arm. \"You grew up in the Age of Technology. Everybody was terribly excited about what could be done with machines\u2014machines to blow up a city all at once, or fly around the world, or take a man to Mars. We have had our fill of\u2014what is the word?\u2014gadgets. Our machines serve us, and so long as they function right, we are satisfied to forget about them.\n \n \"Because this is the Age of Man . We are terribly interested in what can be done with people. Our scientists, like Swarts, are studying human rather than nuclear reactions. We are much more fascinated by the life and death of cultures than by the expansion or contraction of the Universe. With us, it is the people that are important, not gadgets.\"\n \n Maitland stared at her, his face blank. His mind had just manufactured a discouraging analogy. His present position was like that of an earnest 12th Century crusader, deposited by some freak of nature into the year 1950, trying to find a way of reanimating the anti-Mohammedan movement. What chance would he have? The unfortunate knight would argue in vain that the atomic bomb offered a means of finally destroying the infidel....\n \n Maitland looked up at the girl, who was regarding him silently with troubled eyes. \"I think I'd like to be alone for a while,\" he said.\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of space in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 31989, "query_start_index": 31991, "query_end_index": 32048, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Maitland works in the speciality of heat transfer in relation to its application to rocket motors. He has a great and undeniable interest in space. He is able to discern his real location in time using his knowledge of space and the solar system to understand that he is not in the same time as he was before being at the facility. \n\nSpace seems to be of relevance to Swarts and his psychological tests as during the first experiment Swarts tells Maitland that he was brought because of his interest in the moon. One of the first questions Swarts asks Maitland is for his reasoning of why he wants to go to the moon. So, it is clear that Swarts is interested in studying Maitland\u2019s passion and desire for space travel.\n\nWhen discussing with Ching the history and advances that the human race has made since his generation, he excitedly asks about what other planets have been visited and other general information on space travel. His question confuses Ching because she does not understand why he is interested in traveling to space. Maitland finds it incredulously that they have so much technology but have not traveled to space. It shows the dichotomy of their viewpoints because Maitland sees space travel as a solution to population control and as an interesting prospect because space invites and feeds an adventurous spirit. On the other hand, Ching and the rest of the world have no desire for space innovation or travel because it is unnecessary to further interaction with technology. \n"}
{"id": "63150_5", "pid": "63150_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SOUL EATERS\n \n\n By WILLIAM CONOVER\n \n \n Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet\u2014fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \" And so, my dear ,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \" I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets\u2014or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. \"\n \n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder\u2014limpid as a child's.\n \n The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude\u2014the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.\n \n Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.\n \n A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n \n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits\u2014it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla.\n \n Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote.\n \n His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly.\n \n Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there.\n \n \n\n \n Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him.\n \n The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n \n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit\u2014an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them.\n \n \"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger.\n \n Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again\u2014you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace.\n \n \"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!\"\n \n \n\n \n The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak:\n \n \"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know\u2014your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen\u2014has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed.\n \n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her\u2014a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n\"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself\u2014seem to have vanished.\"\n \n Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision.\n \n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast.\n \n \"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself\u2014and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n\"Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n \n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"\n \n He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle.\n \n \n\n \n They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.\n \n A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side.\n \n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.\n \n Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes.\n \n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again.\"\n \n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice.\n \n \"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull\u2014a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have\u2014aside from your recklessness\u2014and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space.\n \n To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew.\n \n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.\n \n And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n \n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n \n \"Prepare to board!\"\n \n Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself:\n \n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice.\n \n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"\n \n George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame.\n \n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey.\n \n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.\n \n Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic:\n \n \"Prepare to return!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.\n \n Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately.\n \n \n\n \n Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits.\n \n \"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement.\n \n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits.\n \n Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic\u2014could be nothing else.\n \n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n \n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.\n \n In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.\n \n But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was\u2014a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him.\n \n Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n \n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact.\n \n It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\n \n \n\n \n With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it.\n \n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap.\n \n \"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n \n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity.\n \n And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.\n \n \"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n \n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n \n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n \n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.\n \n \"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n \n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs.\n \n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n \n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?\"\n \n \"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n \n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P.\n \n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n \n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist.\n \n \"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n \n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing.\n \n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n \n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"\n \n \"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck!\n \n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll need all hands now.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n \n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n \n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n \n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.\n \n Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.\n\nQuestion:\nWhere does the story take place?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28276, "query_start_index": 28278, "query_end_index": 28320, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story starts on Venus, in a pleasure palace where Dennis is trying to distract himself from his ex-fiancee and being grounded on his job. After an attack followed by Dennis' victory, he proceeds Headquarters with the police and soon enters the I.S.P. commander's office. From there he immediately sets off to space on a ship, searching for days through the space for any signs of pirates or the disappeared spaceship. The first stop is the remnants of transport lacking any use. The second is a detected pirate spaceship, which the crew starts to follow. The setting of the chase remains in space, and after being engulfed by a Planetoid, the crew find itself in a strange world. The setting was rocky and looked deadly. Only desolate vista was seen around. "}
{"id": "63150_5", "pid": "63150_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SOUL EATERS\n \n\n By WILLIAM CONOVER\n \n \n Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet\u2014fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \" And so, my dear ,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \" I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets\u2014or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. \"\n \n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder\u2014limpid as a child's.\n \n The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude\u2014the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.\n \n Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.\n \n A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n \n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits\u2014it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla.\n \n Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote.\n \n His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly.\n \n Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there.\n \n \n\n \n Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him.\n \n The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n \n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit\u2014an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them.\n \n \"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger.\n \n Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again\u2014you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace.\n \n \"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!\"\n \n \n\n \n The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak:\n \n \"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know\u2014your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen\u2014has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed.\n \n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her\u2014a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n\"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself\u2014seem to have vanished.\"\n \n Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision.\n \n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast.\n \n \"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself\u2014and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n\"Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n \n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"\n \n He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle.\n \n \n\n \n They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.\n \n A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side.\n \n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.\n \n Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes.\n \n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again.\"\n \n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice.\n \n \"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull\u2014a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have\u2014aside from your recklessness\u2014and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space.\n \n To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew.\n \n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.\n \n And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n \n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n \n \"Prepare to board!\"\n \n Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself:\n \n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice.\n \n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"\n \n George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame.\n \n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey.\n \n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.\n \n Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic:\n \n \"Prepare to return!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.\n \n Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately.\n \n \n\n \n Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits.\n \n \"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement.\n \n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits.\n \n Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic\u2014could be nothing else.\n \n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n \n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.\n \n In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.\n \n But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was\u2014a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him.\n \n Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n \n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact.\n \n It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\n \n \n\n \n With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it.\n \n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap.\n \n \"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n \n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity.\n \n And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.\n \n \"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n \n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n \n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n \n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.\n \n \"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n \n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs.\n \n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n \n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?\"\n \n \"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n \n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P.\n \n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n \n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist.\n \n \"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n \n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing.\n \n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n \n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"\n \n \"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck!\n \n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll need all hands now.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n \n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n \n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n \n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.\n \n Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.\n\nQuestion:\nWhere does the story take place?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28276, "query_start_index": 28278, "query_end_index": 28320, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Dennis is at the Jovian Chamber which is a place that caters to a man\u2019s desire. Then Dennis is taken to the headquarters for the I.S.P, to talk to the commander. He goes to the office of the commander and learns some troubling news about Marla. The crew, along with Dennis and the commander, spend days on a spaceship searching space for Marla\u2019s ship and a pirate ship. When they spot a trail of a spacer, Dennis notes that they are at the intersection of angles Kp at 39 degrees, for 12 minutes, Fp at 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. They fall into an unknown planetoid where the atmosphere is breathable but does not allow for much exertion. "}
{"id": "63150_5", "pid": "63150_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SOUL EATERS\n \n\n By WILLIAM CONOVER\n \n \n Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet\u2014fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \" And so, my dear ,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \" I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets\u2014or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. \"\n \n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder\u2014limpid as a child's.\n \n The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude\u2014the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.\n \n Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.\n \n A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n \n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits\u2014it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla.\n \n Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote.\n \n His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly.\n \n Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there.\n \n \n\n \n Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him.\n \n The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n \n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit\u2014an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them.\n \n \"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger.\n \n Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again\u2014you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace.\n \n \"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!\"\n \n \n\n \n The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak:\n \n \"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know\u2014your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen\u2014has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed.\n \n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her\u2014a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n\"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself\u2014seem to have vanished.\"\n \n Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision.\n \n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast.\n \n \"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself\u2014and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n\"Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n \n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"\n \n He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle.\n \n \n\n \n They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.\n \n A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side.\n \n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.\n \n Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes.\n \n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again.\"\n \n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice.\n \n \"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull\u2014a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have\u2014aside from your recklessness\u2014and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space.\n \n To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew.\n \n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.\n \n And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n \n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n \n \"Prepare to board!\"\n \n Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself:\n \n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice.\n \n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"\n \n George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame.\n \n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey.\n \n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.\n \n Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic:\n \n \"Prepare to return!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.\n \n Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately.\n \n \n\n \n Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits.\n \n \"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement.\n \n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits.\n \n Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic\u2014could be nothing else.\n \n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n \n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.\n \n In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.\n \n But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was\u2014a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him.\n \n Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n \n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact.\n \n It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\n \n \n\n \n With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it.\n \n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap.\n \n \"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n \n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity.\n \n And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.\n \n \"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n \n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n \n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n \n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.\n \n \"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n \n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs.\n \n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n \n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?\"\n \n \"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n \n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P.\n \n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n \n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist.\n \n \"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n \n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing.\n \n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n \n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"\n \n \"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck!\n \n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll need all hands now.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n \n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n \n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n \n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.\n \n Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.\n\nQuestion:\nWhere does the story take place?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28276, "query_start_index": 28278, "query_end_index": 28320, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The beginning of the story takes place in the Jovian Chamber within the Inter-planetary Palace on Venus, where Dennis is staying after being grounded by the I.S.P. The chamber is a luxurious, royal place with drinks, dancers, and anything a man could desire. After the brawl with a Martian, Dennis goes to the I.S.P Commander's office, where he is given a new mission and cruiser, which is updated with intense speed. Once the mission begins, Dennis spends days on the cruiser, which despite being efficient, lacks comfortable space and offices like the other cruisers do. Eventually, the cruiser crashes onto an unknown planet, with strong gravity, intimidating soils and valleys, and iridescent ground. "}
{"id": "63150_5", "pid": "63150_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nTHE SOUL EATERS\n \n\n By WILLIAM CONOVER\n \n \n Firebrand Dennis Brooke had one final chance to redeem himself by capturing Koerber whose ships were the scourge of the Void. But his luck had run its course, and now he was marooned on a rogue planet\u2014fighting to save himself from a menace weapons could not kill.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1944. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n \" And so, my dear ,\" Dennis detected a faint irony in the phrase, \" I'm afraid I can offer no competition to the beauties of five planets\u2014or is it six? With regret I bow myself out, and knowing me as you do, you'll understand the futility of trying to convince me again. Anyway, there will be no temptation, for I'm sailing on a new assignment I've accepted. I did love you.... Good-by. \"\n \n Dennis Brooke had lost count of the times he'd read Marla's last letter, but every time he came to these final, poignant lines, they never failed to conjure a vision of her tawny loveliness, slender as the palms of Venus, and of the blue ecstasy of her eyes, wide with a perpetual wonder\u2014limpid as a child's.\n \n The barbaric rhythms of the Congahua , were a background of annoyance in Dennis' mind; he frowned slightly as the maneuvers of the Mercurian dancer, who writhed among the guests of the notorious pleasure palace, began to leave no doubt as to her intentions. The girl was beautiful, in a sultry, almost incandescent sort of way, but her open promise left him cold. He wanted solitude, somewhere to coordinate his thoughts in silence and salvage something out of the wreck of his heart, not to speak of his career. But Venus, in the throes of a gigantic boom upon the discovery of radio-active fields, could offer only one solitude\u2014the fatal one of her swamps and virgin forests.\n \n Dennis Brooke was thirty, the time when youth no longer seems unending. When the minor adventures of the heart begin to pall. If the loss of Marla left an aching void that all the women of five planets could not fill, the loss of Space, was quite as deadly. For he had been grounded. True, Koerber's escape from the I.S.P. net had not quite been his fault; but had he not been enjoying the joys of a voluptuous Jovian Chamber, in Venus' fabulous Inter-planetary Palace, he would have been ready for duty to complete the last link in the net of I.S.P. cruisers that almost surrounded the space pirate.\n \n A night in the Jovian Chamber, was to be emperor for one night. Every dream of a man's desire was marvelously induced through the skilful use of hypnotics; the rarest viands and most delectable drinks appeared as if by magic; the unearthly peace of an Olympus descended on a man's soul, and beauty ... beauty such as men dreamed of was a warm reality under the ineffable illumination of the Chamber.\n \n It cost a young fortune. But to pleasure mad, boom-ridden Venus, a fortune was a bagatelle. Only it had cost Dennis Brooke far more than a sheaf of credits\u2014it had cost him the severe rebuff of the I.S.P., and most of his heart in Marla.\n \n Dennis sighed, he tilted his red, curly head and drank deeply of the insidious Verbena , fragrant as a mint garden, in the tall frosty glass of Martian Bacca-glas , and as he did so, his brilliant hazel eyes found themselves gazing into the unwinking, violet stare of a young Martian at the next table. There was a smouldering hatred in those eyes, and something else ... envy, perhaps, or was it jealousy? Dennis couldn't tell. But his senses became instantly alert. Danger brought a faint vibration which his superbly trained faculties could instantly denote.\n \n His steady, bronzed hand lowered the drink, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Absorbed in trying to puzzle the sudden enmity of this Martian stranger, he was unaware of the Mercurian Dancer. The latter had edged closer, whirling in prismatic flashes from the myriad semi-precious stones that studded her brief gauze skirt. And now, in a final bid for the spacer's favor she flung herself in his lap and tilted back invitingly.\n \n Some of the guests laughed, others stared in plain envy at the handsome, red-haired spacer, but from the table across, came the tinkling sound of a fragile glass being crushed in a powerful hand, and a muffled Martian curse. Without warning, the Martian was on his feet with the speed of an Hellacorium, the table went crashing to one side as he leaped with deadly intent on the sprawled figure of Dennis Brooke. A high-pitched scream brought instant silence as a Terran girl cried out. Then the Martian's hand reached out hungrily. But Dennis was not there.\n \n \n\n \n Leaping to one side, impervious to the fall of the dancer, he avoided the murderous rush of the Martian youth, then he wheeled swiftly and planted a sledge-hammer blow in that most vulnerable spot of all Martians, the spot just below their narrow, wasp-like waist, and as the Martian half-doubled over, he lefted him with a short jab to the chin that staggered and all but dropped him.\n \n The Martian's violet eyes were black with fury now. He staggered back and sucked in air, his face contorted with excruciating pain. But he was not through. His powerful right shot like a blast straight for Dennis' chest, striking like a piston just below the heart. Dennis took it, flat-footed, without flinching; then he let his right ride over with all the force at his command. It caught the Martian on the jaw and spun him like a top, the pale, imperious face went crimson as he slowly sagged to his knees and rolled to the impeccable mosaics of the floor.\n \n Dennis, breathing heavily, stood over him until the international police arrived, and then he had the surprise of his life. Upon search, the police found a tiny, but fatal silvery tube holstered under his left arm-pit\u2014an atomic-disintegrator, forbidden throughout the interplanetary League. Only major criminals and space pirates still without the law were known to possess them.\n \n \"Looks like your brawl has turned out to be a piece of fool's luck, Brooke!\" The Police Lieutenant favored Dennis with a wry smile. \"If I'm not mistaken this chap's a member of Bren Koerber's pirate crew. Who else could afford to risk his neck at the International, and have in his possession a disintegrator? Pity we have no complete records on that devil's crew! Anyway, we'll radio the I.S.P., perhaps they have details on this dandy!\" He eyed admiringly the priceless Martian embroideries on the unconscious Martian's tunic, the costly border of red, ocelandian fur, and the magnificent black acerine on his finger.\n \n Dennis Brooke shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that would have put to shame the Athenian statues of another age. A faint, bitter smile curved his generous mouth. \"I'm grounded, Gillian, it'd take the capture of Koerber himself to set me right with the I.S.P. again\u2014you don't know Bertram! To him an infraction of rules is a major crime. Damn Venus!\" He reached for his glass of Verbena but the table had turned over during the struggle, and the glass was a shattered mass of gleaming Bacca-glas shards. He laughed shortly as he became conscious of the venomous stare of the Mercurian Dancer, of the excited voices of the guests and the emphatic disapproval of the Venusian proprietor who was shocked at having a brawl in his ultra-expensive, ultra-exclusive Palace.\n \n \"Better come to Headquarters with me, Dennis,\" the lieutenant said gently. \"We'll say you captured him, and if he's Koerber's, the credit's yours. A trip to Terra's what you need, Venus for you is a hoodoo!\"\n \n \n\n \n The stern, white haired I.S.P. Commander behind the immense Aluminil desk, frowned slightly as Dennis Brooke entered. He eyed the six foot four frame of the Captain before him with a mixture of feelings, as if uncertain how to begin. Finally, he sighed as if, having come to a decision, he were forcing himself to speak:\n \n \"Sit down, Dennis. I've sent for you, despite your grounding, for two reasons. The first one you already know\u2014your capture of one of Koerber's henchmen\u2014has given us a line as to his present orbit of piracy, and the means of a check on his activities. But that's not really why I've brought you here.\" He frowned again as if what he had to say were difficult indeed.\n \n \"Marla Starland, your fiancee, accepted an assignment we offered her\u2014a delicate piece of work here on Terra that only a very beautiful, and very clever young lady could perform. And,\" he paused, grimacing,\n\"somewhere between Venus and Terra, the interplanetary spacer bringing her and several other passengers, began to send distress signals. Finally, we couldn't contact the ship any more. It is three days overdue. All passengers, a cargo of radium from Venus worth untold millions, the spacer itself\u2014seem to have vanished.\"\n \n Dennis Brooke's space-tanned features had gone pale. His large hazel eyes, fringed with auburn lashes, too long for a man, were bright slits that smouldered. He stood silent, his hands clenched at his sides, while something cold and sharp seemed to dig at his heart with cruel precision.\n \n \"Marla!\" He breathed at last. The thought of Marla in the power of Koerber sent a wave of anguish that seared through him like an atom-blast.\n \n \"Commander,\" Dennis said, and his rich baritone voice had depths of emotion so great that they startled Commander Bertram himself\u2014and that grizzled veteran of the I.S.P., had at one time or another known every change of torture that could possibly be wrung on a human soul.\n\"Commander, give me one ... one chance at that spawn of unthinkable begetting! Let me try, and I promise you ...\" in his torture, Dennis was unconsciously banging a knotted fist on the chaste, satiny surface of the priceless desk, \"I promise you that I will either bring you Koerber, or forfeit my life!\"\n \n Commander Bertram nodded his head. \"I brought you here for that purpose, son. We have reached a point in our war with Koerber, where the last stakes must be played ... and the last stake is death!\"\n \n He reached over and flipped up the activator on a small telecast set on his desk; instantly the viso-screen lighted up. \"You'll now see a visual record of all we know about the passenger spacer that left Venus with passengers and cargo, as far as we could contact the vessel in space. This, Dennis,\" the Commander emphasized his words, \"is your chance to redeem yourself!\" He fell silent, while the viso-screen began to show a crowded space port on Venus, and a gigantic passenger spacer up-tilted in its cradle.\n \n \n\n \n They watched the parabola it made in its trajectory as it flashed into space and then fell into orbit there beyond the planetary attraction of Venus. On the three-dimensional viso-screen it was uncannily real.\n \n A flight that had taken many hours to accomplish, was shortened on the viso-screen to a matter of minutes. They saw the great, proud interplanetary transport speeding majestically through the starry void, and suddenly, they saw her swerve in a great arc; again she swerved as if avoiding something deadly in space, and point upwards gaining altitude. It was zig-zagging now, desperately maneuvering in an erratic course, and as if by magic, a tiny spot appeared on the transport's side.\n \n Tiny on the viso-screen, the fatal spots must have been huge in actuality. To the Commander of the I.S.P., and to Captain Brooke, it was an old story. Atom-blasts were pitting the spacer's hull with deadly Genton shells. The great transport trembled under the impact of the barrage, and suddenly, the screen went blank.\n \n Commander Bertram turned slowly to face the young I.S.P. captain, whose features were a mask devoid of all expression now, save for the pallor and the burning fire in his eyes.\n \n \"And that's the sixth one in a month. Sometimes the survivors reach Terra in emergency spacers, or are picked up in space by other transports ... and sometimes son ... well, as you know, sometimes they're never seen again.\"\n \n \"When do I leave, Commander!\" Dennis Brooke's voice was like a javelin of ice.\n \n \"Right now, if you wish. We have a new cruiser armored in beryloid with double hull\u2014a new design against Genton shells, but it's the speed of the thing that you'll want to know about. It just about surpasses anything ever invented. Get the figures and data from the coordination room, son; it's serviced and fueled and the crew's aboard.\" He extended his hand. \"You're the best spacer we have\u2014aside from your recklessness\u2014and on your success depends far more than the capture of an outlaw.\" Bertram smiled thinly. \"Happy landing!\"\n \n \n\n II\n \n Their nerves were ragged. Days and days of fruitless search for a phantom ship that seemed to have vanished from space, and an equally elusive pirate whose whereabouts were hidden in the depths of fathomless space.\n \n To all but Captain Brooke, this was a new adventure, their first assignment to duty in a search that went beyond the realm of the inner planets, where men spent sleepless nights in eternal vigilance against stray asteroids and outlaw crews of ruthless vandal ships. Even their cruiser was a new experience, the long, tapering fighter lacked the luxurious offices and appointments of the regular I.S.P. Patrol spacers. It placed a maximum on speed, and all available space was hoarded for fuel. The lightning fast tiger of the space-lanes, was a thing of beauty, but of grim, sleek beauty instinct with power, not the comfortable luxury that they knew.\n \n Day after day they went through their drills, donning space suits, manning battle stations; aiming deadly atom-cannon at empty space, and eternally scanning the vast empty reaches by means of the telecast.\n \n And suddenly, out of the void, as they had all but given up the search as a wild goose chase, a speck was limned in the lighted surface of the viso-screen in the control room. Instantly the I.S.P. cruiser came to life. In a burst of magnificent speed, the cruiser literally devoured the space leagues, until the spacer became a flashing streak. On the viso-screen, the speck grew larger, took on contours, growing and becoming slowly the drifting shell of what had been a transport.\n \n Presently they were within reaching distance, and Captain Brooke commanded through the teleradio from the control room:\n \n \"Prepare to board!\"\n \n Every member of the crew wanted to be among the boarding party, for all but George Randall, the junior member of the crew had served his apprenticeship among the inner planets, Mars, Venus and Terra. He felt nauseated at the very thought of going out there in that vast abyss of space. His young, beardless face, with the candid blue eyes went pale when the order was given. But presently, Captain Brooke named those who were to go beside himself:\n \n \"You, Tom and Scotty, take one emergency plane, and Dallas!\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain!\" Dallas Bernan, the immense third lieutenant boomed in his basso-profundo voice.\n \n \"You and I'll take a second emergency!\" There was a pause in the voice of the Captain from the control room, then: \"Test space suits. Test oxygen helmets! Atom-blasts only, ready in five minutes!\"\n \n George Randall breathed a sigh of relief. He watched them bridge the space to the drifting wreck, then saw them enter what had once been a proud interplanetary liner, now soon to be but drifting dust, and he turned away with a look of shame.\n \n Inside the liner, Captain Dennis Brooke had finished making a detailed survey.\n \n \"No doubt about it,\" he spoke through the radio in his helmet. \"Cargo missing. No survivors. No indication that the repulsion fields were out of order. And finally, those Genton shells could only have been fired by Koerber!\" He tried to maintain a calm exterior, but inwardly he seethed in a cold fury more deadly than any he had ever experienced. Somehow he had expected to find at least one compartment unharmed, where life might have endured, but now, all hope was gone. Only a great resolve to deal with Koerber once and for all remained to him.\n \n Dennis tried not to think of Marla, too great an ache was involved in thinking of her and all he had lost. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, laconic:\n \n \"Prepare to return!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes, the cruiser's nurse, who could take his motors through a major battle, or hell and high water and back again, for that matter, shifted the Venusian weed that made a perpetual bulge on his cheek and gazed curiously at Captain Brooke. They all knew the story in various versions, and with special additions. But they were spacemen, implicit in their loyalty, and with Dennis Brooke they could and did feel safe.\n \n Tom Jeffery, the tall, angular and red-faced Navigator, whose slow, easygoing movements belied the feral persistence of a tiger, and the swiftness of a striking cobra in a fight, led the small procession of men toward the emergency planes. Behind him came Dallas Bernan, third lieutenant, looming like a young asteroid in his space suit, followed by Scotty, and finally Captain Brooke himself. All left in silence, as if the tragedy that had occurred aboard the wrecked liner, had touched them intimately.\n \n \n\n \n Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser, a surprise awaited them. It was young George Randall, whose excited face met them as soon as they had entered the airlocks and removed the space suits.\n \n \"Captain Brooke ... Captain, recordings are showing on the new 'Jet Analyzers' must be the trail of some spacer. Can't be far!\" He was fairly dancing in his excitement, as if the marvelous work of the new invention that detected the disturbance of atomic jets at great distance were his own achievement.\n \n Dennis Brooke smiled. His own heart was hammering, and inwardly he prayed that it were Koerber. It had to be! No interplanetary passenger spacer could possibly be out here at the intersection of angles Kp\n39 degrees, 12 minutes, Fp 67 degrees of Ceres elliptic plane. None but a pirate crew with swift battle cruisers could dare! This was the dangerous asteroid belt, where even planetoids drifted in eccentric uncharted orbits.\n \n Dennis, Tom Jeffery and Scotty Byrnes raced to the control room, followed by the ponderous Dallas to whom hurry in any form was anathema. There could be no doubt now! The \"Jet Analyzer\" recorded powerful disturbance, atomic\u2014could be nothing else.\n \n Instantly Captain Brooke was at the inter-communication speaker:\n \n \"Crew, battle stations! Engine room, full speed!\"\n \n Scotty Byrnes was already dashing to the engine room, where his beloved motors purred with an ascending hum. Aboard the I.S.P. Cruiser each member of the crew raced to his assigned task without delay. Action impended, and after days and nights of inertia, it was a blessed relief. Smiles appeared on haggard faces, and the banter of men suddenly galvanized by a powerful incentive was bandied back and forth. All but George Randall. Now that action was imminent. Something gripped his throat until he could hardly stand the tight collar of his I.S.P. uniform. A growing nausea gripped his bowels, and although he strove to keep calm, his hands trembled beyond control.\n \n In the compact, super-armored control room, Captain Brooke watched the telecast's viso-screen, with hungry eyes that were golden with anticipation. It seemed to him as if an eternity passed before at last, a black speck danced on the illuminated screen, until it finally reached the center of the viso-screen and remained there. It grew by leaps and bounds as the terrific speed of the cruiser minimized the distance long before the quarry was aware of pursuit.\n \n But at last, when the enemy cruiser showed on the viso-screen, unmistakably for what it was\u2014a pirate craft, it showed by its sudden maneuver that it had detected the I.S.P. cruiser. For it had described a parabola in space and headed for the dangerous asteroid belt. As if navigated by a masterly hand that knew each and every orbit of the asteroids, it plunged directly into the asteroid drift, hoping to lose the I.S.P. cruiser with such a maneuver. Ordinarily, it would have succeeded, no I.S.P. patrol ship would have dared to venture into such a trap without specific orders. But to Dennis Brooke, directing the chase from the control room, even certain death was welcome, if only he could take Koerber with him.\n \n Weaving through the deadly belt for several hours, Dennis saw his quarry slow down. Instantly he seized the chance and ordered a salvo from starboard. Koerber's powerful spacer reeled, dived and came up spewing Genton-shells. The battle was on at last.\n \n From the banked atom-cannon of the I.S.P. Cruiser, a deadly curtain of atomic fire blazed at the pirate craft. A ragged rent back toward midship showed on Koerber's Cruiser which trembled as if it had been mortally wounded. Then Dennis maneuvered his cruiser into a power dive as a rain of Genton-shells swept the space lane above him, but as he came up, a lone shell struck. At such close range, super-armor was ripped, second armor penetrated and the magnificent vessel shook under the detonating impact.\n \n It was then that Dennis Brooke saw the immense dark shadow looming immediately behind Koerber's ship. He saw the pirate cruiser zoom desperately in an effort to break the gravity trap of the looming mass, but too late. It struggled like a fly caught in a spider-web to no avail. It was then that Koerber played his last card. Sensing he was doomed, he tried to draw the I.S.P. Cruiser down with him. A powerful magnetic beam lashed out to spear the I.S.P. Cruiser.\n \n \n\n \n With a wrenching turn that almost threw them out of control, Dennis maneuvered to avoid the beam. Again Koerber's beam lashed out, as he sank lower into the looming mass, and again Dennis anticipating the maneuver avoided it.\n \n \"George Randall!\" He shouted desperately into the speaker. \"Cut all jets in the rocket room! Hurry, man!\" He banked again and then zoomed out of the increasing gravity trap.\n \n \"Randall! I've got to use the magnetic repulsion plates.... Cut all the jets!\" But there was no response. Randall's screen remained blank. Then Koerber's lashing magnetic beam touched and the I.S.P. ship was caught, forced to follow the pirate ship's plunge like the weight at the end of a whiplash. Koerber's gunners sent one parting shot, an atom-blast that shook the trapped cruiser like a leaf.\n \n Beneath them, growing larger by the second, a small world rushed up to meet them. The readings in the Planetograph seemed to have gone crazy. It showed diameter 1200 miles; composition mineral and radio-active. Gravity seven-eighths of Terra. It couldn't be! Unless perhaps this unknown planetoid was the legendary core of the world that at one time was supposed to have existed between Jupiter and Mars. Only that could possibly explain the incredible gravity.\n \n And then began another type of battle. Hearing the Captain's orders to Randall, and noting that no result had been obtained, Scotty Byrnes himself cut the jets. The Magnetic Repulsion Plates went into action, too late to save them from being drawn, but at least they could prevent a crash. Far in the distance they could see Koerber's ship preceding them in a free fall, then the Planetoid was rushing up to engulf them.\n \n \n\n III\n \n The atmosphere was somewhat tenuous, but it was breathable, provided a man didn't exert himself. To the silent crew of the I.S.P. Cruiser, the strange world to which Koerber's magnetic Beam had drawn them, was anything but reassuring. Towering crags jutted raggedly against the sky, and the iridescent soil of the narrow valley that walled in the cruiser, had a poisonous, deadly look. As far as their eyes could reach, the desolate, denuded vista stretched to the horizon.\n \n \"Pretty much of a mess!\" Dennis Brooke's face was impassive as he turned to Scotty Byrnes. \"What's your opinion? Think we can patch her up, or are we stuck here indefinitely?\"\n \n Scotty eyed the damage. The atom-blast had penetrated the hull into the forward fuel chambers and the armor had blossomed out like flower petals. The crash-landing had not helped either.\n \n \"Well, there's a few beryloid plates in the storage locker, Captain, but,\" he scratched his head ruminatively and shifted his precious cud.\n \n \"But what? Speak up man!\" It was Tom Jeffery, his nerves on edge, his ordinarily gentle voice like a lash.\n \n \"But, you may as well know it,\" Scotty replied quietly. \"That parting shot of Koerber's severed our main rocket feed. I had to use the emergency tank to make it down here!\"\n \n For a long moment the four men looked at each other in silence. Dennis Brooke's face was still impassive but for the flaming hazel eyes. Tom tugged at the torn sleeve of his I.S.P. uniform, while Scotty gazed mournfully at the damaged ship. Dallas Bernan looked at the long, ragged line of cliffs.\n \n \"I think we got Koerber, though,\" he said at last. \"While Tom was doing a job of navigation, I had one last glimpse of him coming down fast and out of control somewhere behind those crags over there!\"\n \n \"To hell with Koerber!\" Tom Jeffery exploded. \"You mean we're stuck in this hellish rock-pile?\"\n \n \"Easy, Tom!\" Captain Brooke's tones were like ice. On his pale, impassive face, his eyes were like flaming topaz. \"Where's Randall?\"\n \n \"Probably hiding his head under a bunk!\" Dallas laughed with scorn. His contemptuous remark voiced the feelings of the entire crew. A man who failed to be at his battle-station in time of emergency, had no place in the I.S.P.\n \n \"Considering the gravity of this planetoid,\" Dennis Brooke said thoughtfully, \"it's going to take some blast to get us off!\"\n \n \"Maybe we can locate a deposit of anerioum or uranium or something for our atom-busters to chew on!\" Scotty said hopefully. He was an eternal optimist.\n \n \"Better break out those repair plates,\" Dennis said to Scotty. \"Tom, you get the welders ready. I've got a few entries to make in the log book, and then we'll decide on a party to explore the terrain and try to find out what happened to Koerber's ship. I must know,\" he said in a low voice, but with such passion that the others were startled.\n \n A figure appeared in the slanting doorway of the ship in time to hear the last words. It was George Randall, adjusting a bandaged forehead bumped during the crash landing.\n \n \"Captain ... I ... I wanted ...\" he paused unable to continue.\n \n \"You wanted what?\" Captain Brooke's voice was terse. \"Perhaps you wanted to explain why you weren't at your battle station?\"\n \n \"Sir, I wanted to know if ... if I might help Scotty with the welding job....\" That wasn't at all what he'd intended to say. But somehow the words had stuck in his throat and his face flushed deep scarlet. His candid blue eyes were suspiciously brilliant, and the white bandage with its crimson stains made an appealing, boyish figure. It softened the anger in Brooke's heart. Thinking it over calmly, Dennis realized this was the youngster's first trip into the outer orbits, and better men than he had cracked in those vast reaches of space. But there had been an instant when he'd found Randall cowering in the rocket-room, in the grip of paralyzing hysteria, when he could cheerfully have wrung his neck!\n \n \"Certainly, Randall,\" he replied in a much more kindly tone. \"We'll need all hands now.\"\n \n \"Thank you, sir!\" Randall seemed to hesitate for a moment, opened his mouth to speak further, but feeling the other's calculating gaze upon him, he whirled and re-entered the ship.\n \n \"But for him we wouldn't be here!\" Dallas exclaimed. \"Aagh!\" He shook his head in disgust until the several folds of flesh under his chin shook like gelatin. \"Cowards are hell!\" He spat.\n \n \"Easy, Dallas, Randall's a kid, give 'im a chance.\" Dennis observed.\n \n \"You Captain ... you're defending 'im? Why you had a greater stake in this than we, and he's spoiled it for you!\"\n \n \"Yep,\" Dennis nodded. \"But I'm still keeping my senses clear. No feuds on my ship. Get it!\" The last two words cut like a scimitar.\n \n Dallas nodded and lowered his eyes. Scotty shifted his cud and spat a thin stream of juice over the iridescent ground. One by one they re-entered the cruiser.\n\nQuestion:\nWhere does the story take place?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28276, "query_start_index": 28278, "query_end_index": 28320, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The story initially takes place on Venus. The Jovian Chamber is packed, and there is the loud sound of the barbaric rhythms of \"Congahua\" in the background.  There is a beautiful Mercurian dancer who weaves amongst the crowd too. There are also tables to sit and have drinks at. After Venus, the story takes place briefly in Commander Bertram\u2019s office at the I.S.P. There is a large aluminil desk and a small telecast set on it. Then, the story takes place in space as they chase down Koerber's cruiser. The cruiser itself has an engine room, a control room, and bunks for rest. One of the other cruisers they encounter has everything in place, except for a noticeably missing amount of cargo. Finally, when they crash, the place the crew crashes in is very difficult to breathe. There are towering jugs that jut raggedly against the sky and iridescent soil for the narrow valley. The crew is the only people there, and there is just nothing that stretches into the horizon."}
{"id": "51413_4", "pid": "51413_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Ignoble Savages\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction March 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground\u2014underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard society!\n \n\n \n \"Go Away from me, Skkiru,\" Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm.\n\"A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra.\"\n \n \"But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes,\" Skkiru protested.\n \n \"Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!\" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. \"You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Forever!\" He looked at her incredulously. \"You mean we're going to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!\"\n \n Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, \"No, Skkiru, I am not joking,\" a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe.\n \n \"This is, in effect, good-by,\" she continued. \"We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe ... but that will be all.\"\n \n Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber.\n\"Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!\"\n \n There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face\u2014an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl.\n \n \"I am sorry, Skkiru,\" Bbulas intoned. \"I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all.\"\n \n \"It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru,\" Larhgan put in gently, \"but the welfare of our planet comes first.\"\n \n \n\n \n She had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw.\n \n No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. \"Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestess? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You\u2014\"\n \n \"Now, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, \"you know that all the ranks and positions were distributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive.\"\n \n Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt.\n \n \"After all,\" he went on speaking as he wiped, \"I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you\u2014a mere private citizen\u2014have the right to question them.\"\n \n \"Just because you went to school in another solar system,\" Skkiru said, whirling with anger, \"you think you're so smart!\"\n \n \"I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time.\"\n \n Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized.\n  I hate Terrestrials , Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae\u2014if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation.\n \n \"Skkiru!\" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance\u2014her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed\u2014and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. \"One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!\"\n \n \"And I have already explained to you, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, \"that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Earthmen say, kismet.\"\n \n \n\n \n He adjusted the fall of his glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber.\n  Kismet , Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, \"And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like\u2014like savages.\"\n \n \"It is necessary,\" Bbulas replied without turning.\n \n \"Pooh,\" Skkiru said. \"Pooh, pooh , POOH!\"\n \n Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. \"Skkiru! Such language!\"\n \n \"As you said,\" Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, \"the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker.\"\n \n \"But I can't work metal!\"\n \n \"Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts,\" Bbulas said smugly, \"because you will be a pariah without a trade.\"\n \n \"Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch\u2014\" Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him\u2014\"and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl.\"\n \n \"I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!\" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air.\n \n \"As for me,\" she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, \"I do not think I shall ever marry. I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?\"\n \n \"Even if there will be,\" Bbulas said, \"you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes.\"\n \n Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. \"I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs,\" she vowed, \"and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking.\"\n \n It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solution to the planet's problem. \"Listen\u2014\" he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late.\n \n \"Earth ship in view!\" a squeaky voice called through the intercom.\n\"Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes.\"\n \n Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash.\n \n \"Hurry up, Skkiru.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bbulas slid the ornate headdress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance\u2014which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist.\n \n \"Hurry up, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said. \"They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started.\"\n \n \"For my part, I wish we'd never started,\" Skkiru grumbled. \"What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?\"\n \n That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that school-days were long since over.\n \n \"I've told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them,\" he said, with affected weariness. \"After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other\u2014and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra.\"\n \n \"For Snaddra,\" Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth\u2014or so the fictapes seemed to indicate\u2014was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial life-form. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too.\n \n \"We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru,\" she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, \"but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me\u2014and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas.\"\n \n \"If that doesn't,\" Bbulas said, \"I have other methods of inspiration.\"\n \n \"All right,\" Skkiru answered sulkily. \"I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Inter-galactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg . But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it.\"\n \n All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. \"I'm proud of you, Skkiru,\" she said brokenly.\n \n Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence.\n \n \n\n \n \"Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd,\" Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad\u2014to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almost imperceptible.\n \n \"Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd,\" chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor\u2014now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metal-workers\u2014and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it unnecessary\u2014but now both air-cars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive.\n \n The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or\u2014more properly speaking on Snaddra\u2014the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid.\n \n As the mud clutched his toes, Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten around to\u2014the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment\u2014and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it.\n \n Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it.\n \n \n\n \n The newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb.\n \n In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms, entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching\u2014thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide.\n \n \"Look, Raoul,\" the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran\u2014which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. \"A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system\u2014what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry.\"\n \n \"Oh, they were cannibals?\" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. \"How horrible!\"\n \n \"No, not at all,\" the other assured him. \"They weren't human\u2014another species entirely\u2014so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know.\"\n \n \"And the missionaries\u2014did they soften them up, Cyril?\"\n \n \"They softened up the missionaries, I believe.\" Cyril laughed. \"Ah, well, it's all in the day's work.\"\n \n \"I hope these creatures are not man-eaters,\" Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession\u2014 creatures indeed ! Skkiru thought, with a mental sniff.\n\"We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it.\"\n \n \"Oh, you will, my boy, you will.\" Cyril clapped the younger man on the shoulder. \"I have every confidence in your ability.\"\n \n Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials\u2014which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite.\n \n \"The natives certainly appear to be human enough,\" Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. \"Some slight differences, of course\u2014but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color.\"\n  If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon.\n \n \n\n \n Cyril frowned and his companion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be\u2014a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul.\n \n \"Remember,\" Cyril said sternly, \"we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity.\"\n \n \"Yes, Cyril,\" Raoul said meekly.\n \n Cyril assumed a more cheerful aspect \"I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?\"\n  Money , Skkiru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be.\n \n \"How should I know?\" Raoul shrugged.\n \n \"Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting.\"\n \n \"Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?\" Raoul suggested grumpily.\n\"The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one.\"\n \n \"Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!\"\n \n Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable\u2014and entirely genuine\u2014murmurs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops\u2014and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the \"high priest\" was off his rocker.\n \n To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about possession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once.\n \n On Earth, he had heard, where people lived exposed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on\u2014which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population\u2014like its natural resources\u2014was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival.\n \n \n\n \n Being a beggar, Skkiru discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple\u2014a ramshackle affair, but then it had been run up in only three days\u2014where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him\u2014and not only for his forwardness\u2014that was in character on both sides, too.\n \n Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising\u2014a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metal-working was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out.\n \n Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the \"high priest\" with a simple-minded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath depended upon imports.\n \n As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas\u2014who fancied himself a speech-writer as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit.\n \n The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skkiru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote.\n \n \"... and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth,\" she was saying in her melodious voice. \"Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth....\"\n \n Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face.\n \n \"... and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy.\"\n \n \n\n \n She had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. \"Dear friends, we were honored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us.\"\n \n The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended.\n \n \"We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way.\"\n  Ha, ha , Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha!\n \n \n \"But why is it,\" Raoul whispered in Terran as he glanced around out of the corners of his eyes, \"that only the beggar wears mudshoes?\"\n \n \"Shhh,\" Cyril hissed back. \"We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!\"\n \n Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man.\n \n \"We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs,\" Bbulas said with great self-control, \"and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance.\"\n \n \"Rain dance!\" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. \"But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course,\" he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, \"that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!\"\n \n Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff.\n \n \"But,\" Raoul went on, \"one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud....\"\n \n The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. \"Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain.\"\n \n He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this high-school theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others prunes, like the beggarship.\n \n What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious young man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury.\n \n \n\n \n Unfortunately, the fees that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal limits. A man might be willing to die for his planet in many ways\u2014but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them.\n \n All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities.\n \n He could, of course, emigrate to another part of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while\u2014but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan.\n \n As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-and-book dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply.\n \n It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and\u2014aside from minerals\u2014they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice\u2014the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business.\n \n Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in.\n \n \n\n \n The traditional office of Planetary Dilettante was a civil-service job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm\u2014and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top.\n \n The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortune, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population.\n \n The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came\u2014and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soul-searching, called upon Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra\u2014and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program.\n \n It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice.\n \n But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings\u2014though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library\u2014seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand\u2014which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance.\n \n \"Skkiru!\" Bbulas was screaming, as he spun, now that the Terrans were out of ear- and eye-shot \"Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?\"\n \n Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. \"Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting junk and I thought\u2014\"\n \n Bbulas twirled madly in the air. \"You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!\"\n \n \"Yes, Bbulas,\" Skkiru said meekly.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story, Snaddra.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30619, "query_start_index": 30621, "query_end_index": 30674, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Snaddra is a planet leagues away from many other solar systems. Its isolation and general lack of resources has left the planet as a whole in a terrible situation. Snaddra has two seasons: wet and wetter season. Raining practically every day, the surface of the planet is covered in mud. Because of the muddy surface and difficult weather, the Snaddrath have built cities underground and truly thrived there. Skkiru, one of the main characters, is an architect, and supposedly helped to build underground buildings and cities. Their futuristic lifestyle is threatened, however, by a lack of resources. The only crop that can grow on Snaddra is rice, brought in by Terrans, and much of the native animals and fish are dying out. The one commodity and resource left is minerals. However, the constant importation of foreign goods depleted their economy, leaving the Snaddrath between a rock and a hard place. \nBbulas, the Planetary Dilettante, developed the Bbulas Plan to save Snaddra from ruin. He designed a whole aboveground world, new garbs for citizens, as well as an entirely new culture. He believes, as does most of Snaddra, that a primitive culture will draw Terrans in more than an equally advanced and civilized one. So, the story mostly takes place on the surface of Snaddra, now covered in huts. \n"}
{"id": "51413_4", "pid": "51413_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Ignoble Savages\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction March 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground\u2014underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard society!\n \n\n \n \"Go Away from me, Skkiru,\" Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm.\n\"A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra.\"\n \n \"But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes,\" Skkiru protested.\n \n \"Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!\" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. \"You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Forever!\" He looked at her incredulously. \"You mean we're going to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!\"\n \n Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, \"No, Skkiru, I am not joking,\" a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe.\n \n \"This is, in effect, good-by,\" she continued. \"We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe ... but that will be all.\"\n \n Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber.\n\"Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!\"\n \n There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face\u2014an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl.\n \n \"I am sorry, Skkiru,\" Bbulas intoned. \"I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all.\"\n \n \"It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru,\" Larhgan put in gently, \"but the welfare of our planet comes first.\"\n \n \n\n \n She had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw.\n \n No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. \"Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestess? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You\u2014\"\n \n \"Now, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, \"you know that all the ranks and positions were distributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive.\"\n \n Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt.\n \n \"After all,\" he went on speaking as he wiped, \"I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you\u2014a mere private citizen\u2014have the right to question them.\"\n \n \"Just because you went to school in another solar system,\" Skkiru said, whirling with anger, \"you think you're so smart!\"\n \n \"I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time.\"\n \n Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized.\n  I hate Terrestrials , Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae\u2014if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation.\n \n \"Skkiru!\" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance\u2014her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed\u2014and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. \"One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!\"\n \n \"And I have already explained to you, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, \"that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Earthmen say, kismet.\"\n \n \n\n \n He adjusted the fall of his glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber.\n  Kismet , Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, \"And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like\u2014like savages.\"\n \n \"It is necessary,\" Bbulas replied without turning.\n \n \"Pooh,\" Skkiru said. \"Pooh, pooh , POOH!\"\n \n Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. \"Skkiru! Such language!\"\n \n \"As you said,\" Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, \"the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker.\"\n \n \"But I can't work metal!\"\n \n \"Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts,\" Bbulas said smugly, \"because you will be a pariah without a trade.\"\n \n \"Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch\u2014\" Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him\u2014\"and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl.\"\n \n \"I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!\" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air.\n \n \"As for me,\" she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, \"I do not think I shall ever marry. I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?\"\n \n \"Even if there will be,\" Bbulas said, \"you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes.\"\n \n Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. \"I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs,\" she vowed, \"and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking.\"\n \n It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solution to the planet's problem. \"Listen\u2014\" he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late.\n \n \"Earth ship in view!\" a squeaky voice called through the intercom.\n\"Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes.\"\n \n Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash.\n \n \"Hurry up, Skkiru.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bbulas slid the ornate headdress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance\u2014which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist.\n \n \"Hurry up, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said. \"They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started.\"\n \n \"For my part, I wish we'd never started,\" Skkiru grumbled. \"What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?\"\n \n That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that school-days were long since over.\n \n \"I've told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them,\" he said, with affected weariness. \"After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other\u2014and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra.\"\n \n \"For Snaddra,\" Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth\u2014or so the fictapes seemed to indicate\u2014was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial life-form. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too.\n \n \"We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru,\" she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, \"but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me\u2014and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas.\"\n \n \"If that doesn't,\" Bbulas said, \"I have other methods of inspiration.\"\n \n \"All right,\" Skkiru answered sulkily. \"I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Inter-galactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg . But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it.\"\n \n All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. \"I'm proud of you, Skkiru,\" she said brokenly.\n \n Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence.\n \n \n\n \n \"Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd,\" Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad\u2014to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almost imperceptible.\n \n \"Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd,\" chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor\u2014now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metal-workers\u2014and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it unnecessary\u2014but now both air-cars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive.\n \n The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or\u2014more properly speaking on Snaddra\u2014the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid.\n \n As the mud clutched his toes, Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten around to\u2014the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment\u2014and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it.\n \n Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it.\n \n \n\n \n The newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb.\n \n In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms, entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching\u2014thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide.\n \n \"Look, Raoul,\" the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran\u2014which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. \"A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system\u2014what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry.\"\n \n \"Oh, they were cannibals?\" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. \"How horrible!\"\n \n \"No, not at all,\" the other assured him. \"They weren't human\u2014another species entirely\u2014so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know.\"\n \n \"And the missionaries\u2014did they soften them up, Cyril?\"\n \n \"They softened up the missionaries, I believe.\" Cyril laughed. \"Ah, well, it's all in the day's work.\"\n \n \"I hope these creatures are not man-eaters,\" Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession\u2014 creatures indeed ! Skkiru thought, with a mental sniff.\n\"We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it.\"\n \n \"Oh, you will, my boy, you will.\" Cyril clapped the younger man on the shoulder. \"I have every confidence in your ability.\"\n \n Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials\u2014which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite.\n \n \"The natives certainly appear to be human enough,\" Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. \"Some slight differences, of course\u2014but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color.\"\n  If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon.\n \n \n\n \n Cyril frowned and his companion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be\u2014a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul.\n \n \"Remember,\" Cyril said sternly, \"we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity.\"\n \n \"Yes, Cyril,\" Raoul said meekly.\n \n Cyril assumed a more cheerful aspect \"I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?\"\n  Money , Skkiru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be.\n \n \"How should I know?\" Raoul shrugged.\n \n \"Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting.\"\n \n \"Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?\" Raoul suggested grumpily.\n\"The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one.\"\n \n \"Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!\"\n \n Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable\u2014and entirely genuine\u2014murmurs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops\u2014and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the \"high priest\" was off his rocker.\n \n To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about possession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once.\n \n On Earth, he had heard, where people lived exposed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on\u2014which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population\u2014like its natural resources\u2014was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival.\n \n \n\n \n Being a beggar, Skkiru discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple\u2014a ramshackle affair, but then it had been run up in only three days\u2014where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him\u2014and not only for his forwardness\u2014that was in character on both sides, too.\n \n Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising\u2014a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metal-working was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out.\n \n Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the \"high priest\" with a simple-minded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath depended upon imports.\n \n As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas\u2014who fancied himself a speech-writer as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit.\n \n The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skkiru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote.\n \n \"... and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth,\" she was saying in her melodious voice. \"Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth....\"\n \n Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face.\n \n \"... and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy.\"\n \n \n\n \n She had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. \"Dear friends, we were honored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us.\"\n \n The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended.\n \n \"We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way.\"\n  Ha, ha , Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha!\n \n \n \"But why is it,\" Raoul whispered in Terran as he glanced around out of the corners of his eyes, \"that only the beggar wears mudshoes?\"\n \n \"Shhh,\" Cyril hissed back. \"We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!\"\n \n Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man.\n \n \"We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs,\" Bbulas said with great self-control, \"and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance.\"\n \n \"Rain dance!\" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. \"But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course,\" he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, \"that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!\"\n \n Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff.\n \n \"But,\" Raoul went on, \"one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud....\"\n \n The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. \"Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain.\"\n \n He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this high-school theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others prunes, like the beggarship.\n \n What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious young man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury.\n \n \n\n \n Unfortunately, the fees that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal limits. A man might be willing to die for his planet in many ways\u2014but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them.\n \n All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities.\n \n He could, of course, emigrate to another part of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while\u2014but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan.\n \n As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-and-book dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply.\n \n It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and\u2014aside from minerals\u2014they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice\u2014the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business.\n \n Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in.\n \n \n\n \n The traditional office of Planetary Dilettante was a civil-service job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm\u2014and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top.\n \n The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortune, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population.\n \n The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came\u2014and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soul-searching, called upon Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra\u2014and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program.\n \n It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice.\n \n But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings\u2014though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library\u2014seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand\u2014which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance.\n \n \"Skkiru!\" Bbulas was screaming, as he spun, now that the Terrans were out of ear- and eye-shot \"Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?\"\n \n Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. \"Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting junk and I thought\u2014\"\n \n Bbulas twirled madly in the air. \"You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!\"\n \n \"Yes, Bbulas,\" Skkiru said meekly.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story, Snaddra.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30619, "query_start_index": 30621, "query_end_index": 30674, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "On Snaddra, it rains almost all the time, and the surface is covered with thick, deep, murky mud. The temperature is uncomfortably cool. They have advanced technology in their air-cars. In addition to a president and parliament, the natives have a Planetary Dilettante. This civil-service position is filled by a Snaddran who has the highest intelligence score on a competitive examination. The winner attends university on Gambrell, which is the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to receive a Terran education. This is so expensive that only one person per generation can be awarded this opportunity. The Diletantte\u2019s role is to help the planet in times of emergency. Presumably, the Diletantte\u2019s superior intellect and education enable him to determine the best ways to handle the emergencies that arise. Snaddrans live underground, perhaps because of the unpleasant conditions on the planet\u2019s surface where it rains almost constantly, and the ground is all mud. Snaddra\u2019s population and natural resources are quickly dwindling, and its main natural resource has been minerals. Life forms on the planet are on the verge of extinction, and the only food the planet produces is fish and rice. Other foods and materials must be imported from other planets, which is extremely expensive because Snaddra is not located along direct trade routes. The planet also doesn\u2019t attract tourists. The society has just been transformed in preparation for the arrival of the Terrans who want to study them. Now the society features a high priest and priestess. All the metal workers have been made outcasts, and beggars are just slightly higher than the metal workers. \n"}
{"id": "51413_4", "pid": "51413_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Ignoble Savages\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction March 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground\u2014underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard society!\n \n\n \n \"Go Away from me, Skkiru,\" Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm.\n\"A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra.\"\n \n \"But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes,\" Skkiru protested.\n \n \"Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!\" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. \"You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Forever!\" He looked at her incredulously. \"You mean we're going to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!\"\n \n Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, \"No, Skkiru, I am not joking,\" a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe.\n \n \"This is, in effect, good-by,\" she continued. \"We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe ... but that will be all.\"\n \n Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber.\n\"Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!\"\n \n There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face\u2014an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl.\n \n \"I am sorry, Skkiru,\" Bbulas intoned. \"I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all.\"\n \n \"It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru,\" Larhgan put in gently, \"but the welfare of our planet comes first.\"\n \n \n\n \n She had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw.\n \n No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. \"Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestess? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You\u2014\"\n \n \"Now, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, \"you know that all the ranks and positions were distributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive.\"\n \n Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt.\n \n \"After all,\" he went on speaking as he wiped, \"I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you\u2014a mere private citizen\u2014have the right to question them.\"\n \n \"Just because you went to school in another solar system,\" Skkiru said, whirling with anger, \"you think you're so smart!\"\n \n \"I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time.\"\n \n Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized.\n  I hate Terrestrials , Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae\u2014if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation.\n \n \"Skkiru!\" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance\u2014her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed\u2014and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. \"One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!\"\n \n \"And I have already explained to you, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, \"that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Earthmen say, kismet.\"\n \n \n\n \n He adjusted the fall of his glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber.\n  Kismet , Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, \"And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like\u2014like savages.\"\n \n \"It is necessary,\" Bbulas replied without turning.\n \n \"Pooh,\" Skkiru said. \"Pooh, pooh , POOH!\"\n \n Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. \"Skkiru! Such language!\"\n \n \"As you said,\" Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, \"the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker.\"\n \n \"But I can't work metal!\"\n \n \"Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts,\" Bbulas said smugly, \"because you will be a pariah without a trade.\"\n \n \"Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch\u2014\" Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him\u2014\"and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl.\"\n \n \"I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!\" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air.\n \n \"As for me,\" she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, \"I do not think I shall ever marry. I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?\"\n \n \"Even if there will be,\" Bbulas said, \"you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes.\"\n \n Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. \"I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs,\" she vowed, \"and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking.\"\n \n It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solution to the planet's problem. \"Listen\u2014\" he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late.\n \n \"Earth ship in view!\" a squeaky voice called through the intercom.\n\"Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes.\"\n \n Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash.\n \n \"Hurry up, Skkiru.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bbulas slid the ornate headdress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance\u2014which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist.\n \n \"Hurry up, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said. \"They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started.\"\n \n \"For my part, I wish we'd never started,\" Skkiru grumbled. \"What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?\"\n \n That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that school-days were long since over.\n \n \"I've told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them,\" he said, with affected weariness. \"After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other\u2014and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra.\"\n \n \"For Snaddra,\" Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth\u2014or so the fictapes seemed to indicate\u2014was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial life-form. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too.\n \n \"We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru,\" she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, \"but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me\u2014and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas.\"\n \n \"If that doesn't,\" Bbulas said, \"I have other methods of inspiration.\"\n \n \"All right,\" Skkiru answered sulkily. \"I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Inter-galactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg . But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it.\"\n \n All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. \"I'm proud of you, Skkiru,\" she said brokenly.\n \n Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence.\n \n \n\n \n \"Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd,\" Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad\u2014to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almost imperceptible.\n \n \"Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd,\" chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor\u2014now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metal-workers\u2014and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it unnecessary\u2014but now both air-cars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive.\n \n The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or\u2014more properly speaking on Snaddra\u2014the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid.\n \n As the mud clutched his toes, Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten around to\u2014the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment\u2014and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it.\n \n Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it.\n \n \n\n \n The newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb.\n \n In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms, entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching\u2014thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide.\n \n \"Look, Raoul,\" the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran\u2014which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. \"A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system\u2014what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry.\"\n \n \"Oh, they were cannibals?\" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. \"How horrible!\"\n \n \"No, not at all,\" the other assured him. \"They weren't human\u2014another species entirely\u2014so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know.\"\n \n \"And the missionaries\u2014did they soften them up, Cyril?\"\n \n \"They softened up the missionaries, I believe.\" Cyril laughed. \"Ah, well, it's all in the day's work.\"\n \n \"I hope these creatures are not man-eaters,\" Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession\u2014 creatures indeed ! Skkiru thought, with a mental sniff.\n\"We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it.\"\n \n \"Oh, you will, my boy, you will.\" Cyril clapped the younger man on the shoulder. \"I have every confidence in your ability.\"\n \n Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials\u2014which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite.\n \n \"The natives certainly appear to be human enough,\" Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. \"Some slight differences, of course\u2014but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color.\"\n  If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon.\n \n \n\n \n Cyril frowned and his companion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be\u2014a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul.\n \n \"Remember,\" Cyril said sternly, \"we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity.\"\n \n \"Yes, Cyril,\" Raoul said meekly.\n \n Cyril assumed a more cheerful aspect \"I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?\"\n  Money , Skkiru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be.\n \n \"How should I know?\" Raoul shrugged.\n \n \"Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting.\"\n \n \"Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?\" Raoul suggested grumpily.\n\"The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one.\"\n \n \"Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!\"\n \n Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable\u2014and entirely genuine\u2014murmurs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops\u2014and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the \"high priest\" was off his rocker.\n \n To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about possession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once.\n \n On Earth, he had heard, where people lived exposed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on\u2014which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population\u2014like its natural resources\u2014was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival.\n \n \n\n \n Being a beggar, Skkiru discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple\u2014a ramshackle affair, but then it had been run up in only three days\u2014where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him\u2014and not only for his forwardness\u2014that was in character on both sides, too.\n \n Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising\u2014a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metal-working was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out.\n \n Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the \"high priest\" with a simple-minded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath depended upon imports.\n \n As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas\u2014who fancied himself a speech-writer as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit.\n \n The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skkiru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote.\n \n \"... and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth,\" she was saying in her melodious voice. \"Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth....\"\n \n Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face.\n \n \"... and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy.\"\n \n \n\n \n She had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. \"Dear friends, we were honored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us.\"\n \n The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended.\n \n \"We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way.\"\n  Ha, ha , Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha!\n \n \n \"But why is it,\" Raoul whispered in Terran as he glanced around out of the corners of his eyes, \"that only the beggar wears mudshoes?\"\n \n \"Shhh,\" Cyril hissed back. \"We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!\"\n \n Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man.\n \n \"We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs,\" Bbulas said with great self-control, \"and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance.\"\n \n \"Rain dance!\" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. \"But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course,\" he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, \"that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!\"\n \n Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff.\n \n \"But,\" Raoul went on, \"one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud....\"\n \n The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. \"Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain.\"\n \n He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this high-school theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others prunes, like the beggarship.\n \n What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious young man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury.\n \n \n\n \n Unfortunately, the fees that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal limits. A man might be willing to die for his planet in many ways\u2014but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them.\n \n All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities.\n \n He could, of course, emigrate to another part of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while\u2014but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan.\n \n As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-and-book dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply.\n \n It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and\u2014aside from minerals\u2014they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice\u2014the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business.\n \n Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in.\n \n \n\n \n The traditional office of Planetary Dilettante was a civil-service job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm\u2014and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top.\n \n The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortune, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population.\n \n The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came\u2014and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soul-searching, called upon Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra\u2014and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program.\n \n It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice.\n \n But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings\u2014though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library\u2014seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand\u2014which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance.\n \n \"Skkiru!\" Bbulas was screaming, as he spun, now that the Terrans were out of ear- and eye-shot \"Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?\"\n \n Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. \"Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting junk and I thought\u2014\"\n \n Bbulas twirled madly in the air. \"You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!\"\n \n \"Yes, Bbulas,\" Skkiru said meekly.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story, Snaddra.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30619, "query_start_index": 30621, "query_end_index": 30674, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Snaddra, the planet where the story takes place, is in deep trouble. The Snaddrath who live underground, are forced to take a chance on the Planetary Dilettante\u2019s plan to save the society. \nThe population of Snaddra is decreasing rapidly, there are almost zero natural resources left, and creatures from other planets are not interested in visiting Snaddra for tourism or trading purposes. Food and other resources have to be purchased from other planets, and that is a highly expensive endeavor. Metal-working is the most important industry they have, yet metal-workers are looked at as the lowliest of the Snaddraths. Instead of being thankful for their hardest and most important workers, they treat them very poorly. \n\nWhen Raoul offers Skkiru a chocolate bar, he happily accepts the gift. This is because chocolate is only available in very expensive shops, and Skkiru has had very few opportunities to taste the delicacy. \n\nThe surface of Snaddra is virtually untouched because all of society lives in underground cities. When the citizens embark on their new mission to convince the Terran that they live primitive lives on the surface, they are wholly unprepared to deal with the rainy and windy weather. The nonstop precipitation means that everyone is standing in mud, and their costumes do not adequately protect them from the harsh conditions. \n"}
{"id": "51413_4", "pid": "51413_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nThe Ignoble Savages\n \n \n By EVELYN E. SMITH\n \n Illustrated by DILLON\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction March 1957. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n Snaddra had but one choice in its fight to afford to live belowground\u2014underhandedly pretend theirs was an aboveboard society!\n \n\n \n \"Go Away from me, Skkiru,\" Larhgan said, pushing his hand off her arm.\n\"A beggar does not associate with the high priestess of Snaddra.\"\n \n \"But the Earthmen aren't due for another fifteen minutes,\" Skkiru protested.\n \n \"Of what importance are fifteen minutes compared to eternity!\" she exclaimed. Her lovely eyes fuzzed softly with emotion. \"You don't seem to realize, Skkiru, that this isn't just a matter of minutes or hours. It's forever.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Forever!\" He looked at her incredulously. \"You mean we're going to keep this up as a permanent thing? You're joking!\"\n \n Bbulas groaned, but Skkiru didn't care about that. The sad, sweet way Larhgan shook her beautiful head disturbed him much more, and when she said, \"No, Skkiru, I am not joking,\" a tiny pang of doubt and apprehension began to quiver in his second smallest left toe.\n \n \"This is, in effect, good-by,\" she continued. \"We shall see each other again, of course, but only from a distance. On feast days, perhaps you may be permitted to kiss the hem of my robe ... but that will be all.\"\n \n Skkiru turned to the third person present in the council chamber.\n\"Bbulas, this is your fault! It was all your idea!\"\n \n There was regret on the Dilettante's thin face\u2014an obviously insincere regret, the younger man knew, since he was well aware how Bbulas had always felt about the girl.\n \n \"I am sorry, Skkiru,\" Bbulas intoned. \"I had fancied you understood. This is not a game we are playing, but a new way of life we are adopting. A necessary way of life, if we of Snaddra are to keep on living at all.\"\n \n \"It's not that I don't love you, Skkiru,\" Larhgan put in gently, \"but the welfare of our planet comes first.\"\n \n \n\n \n She had been seeing too many of the Terrestrial fictapes from the library, Skkiru thought resentfully. There was too damn much Terran influence on this planet. And this new project was the last straw.\n \n No longer able to control his rage and grief, he turned a triple somersault in the air with rage. \"Then why was I made a beggar and she the high priestess? You arranged that purposely, Bbulas. You\u2014\"\n \n \"Now, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said wearily, for they had been through all this before, \"you know that all the ranks and positions were distributed by impartial lot, except for mine, and, of course, such jobs as could carry over from the civilized into the primitive.\"\n \n Bbulas breathed on the spectacles he was wearing, as contact lenses were not considered backward enough for the kind of planet Snaddra was now supposed to be, and attempted to wipe them dry on his robe. However, the thick, jewel-studded embroidery got in his way and so he was forced to lift the robe and wipe all three of the lenses on the smooth, soft, spun metal of his top underskirt.\n \n \"After all,\" he went on speaking as he wiped, \"I have to be high priest, since I organized this culture and am the only one here qualified to administer it. And, as the president himself concurred in these arrangements, I hardly think you\u2014a mere private citizen\u2014have the right to question them.\"\n \n \"Just because you went to school in another solar system,\" Skkiru said, whirling with anger, \"you think you're so smart!\"\n \n \"I won't deny that I do have educational and cultural advantages which were, unfortunately, not available to the general populace of this planet. However, even under the old system, I was always glad to utilize my superior attainments as Official Dilettante for the good of all and now\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, glad to have a chance to rig this whole setup so you could break up things between Larhgan and me. You've had your eye on her for some time.\"\n \n Skkiru coiled his antennae at Bbulas, hoping the insult would provoke him into an unbecoming whirl, but the Dilettante remained calm. One of the chief outward signs of Terran-type training was self-control and Bbulas had been thoroughly terranized.\n  I hate Terrestrials , Skkiru said to himself. I hate Terra. The quiver of anxiety had risen up his leg and was coiling and uncoiling in his stomach. He hoped it wouldn't reach his antennae\u2014if he were to break down and psonk in front of Larhgan, it would be the final humiliation.\n \n \"Skkiru!\" the girl exclaimed, rotating gently, for she, like her fiance\u2014her erstwhile fiance, that was, for the new regime had caused all such ties to be severed\u2014and every other literate person on the planet, had received her education at the local university. Although sound, the school was admittedly provincial in outlook and very poor in the emotional department. \"One would almost think that the lots had some sort of divine intelligence behind them, because you certainly are behaving in a beggarly manner!\"\n \n \"And I have already explained to you, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said, with a patience much more infuriating than the girl's anger, \"that I had no idea of who was to become my high priestess. The lots chose Larhgan. It is, as the Earthmen say, kismet.\"\n \n \n\n \n He adjusted the fall of his glittering robe before the great polished four-dimensional reflector that formed one wall of the chamber.\n  Kismet , Skkiru muttered to himself, and a little sleight of hand. But he didn't dare offer this conclusion aloud; the libel laws of Snaddra were very severe. So he had to fall back on a weak, \"And I suppose it is kismet that makes us all have to go live out on the ground during the day, like\u2014like savages.\"\n \n \"It is necessary,\" Bbulas replied without turning.\n \n \"Pooh,\" Skkiru said. \"Pooh, pooh , POOH!\"\n \n Larhgan's dainty earflaps closed. \"Skkiru! Such language!\"\n \n \"As you said,\" Bbulas murmured, contemptuously coiling one antenna at Skkiru, \"the lots chose well and if you touch me, Skkiru, we shall have another drawing for beggar and you will be made a metal-worker.\"\n \n \"But I can't work metal!\"\n \n \"Then that will make it much worse for you than for the other outcasts,\" Bbulas said smugly, \"because you will be a pariah without a trade.\"\n \n \"Speaking of pariahs, that reminds me, Skkiru, before I forget, I'd better give you back your grimpatch\u2014\" Larhgan handed the glittering bauble to him\u2014\"and you give me mine. Since we can't be betrothed any longer, you might want to give yours to some nice beggar girl.\"\n \n \"I don't want to give my grimpatch to some nice beggar girl!\" Skkiru yelled, twirling madly in the air.\n \n \"As for me,\" she sighed, standing soulfully on her head, \"I do not think I shall ever marry. I shall make the religious life my career. Are there going to be any saints in your mythos, Bbulas?\"\n \n \"Even if there will be,\" Bbulas said, \"you certainly won't qualify if you keep putting yourself into a position which not only represents a trait wholly out of keeping with the new culture, but is most unseemly with the high priestess's robes.\"\n \n Larhgan ignored his unfeeling observations. \"I shall set myself apart from mundane affairs,\" she vowed, \"and I shall pretend to be happy, even though my heart will be breaking.\"\n \n It was only at that moment that Skkiru realized just how outrageous the whole thing really was. There must be another solution to the planet's problem. \"Listen\u2014\" he began, but just then excited noises filtered down from overhead. It was too late.\n \n \"Earth ship in view!\" a squeaky voice called through the intercom.\n\"Everybody topside and don't forget your shoes.\"\n \n Except the beggar. Beggars went barefoot. Beggars suffered. Bbulas had made him beggar purposely, and the lots were a lot of slibwash.\n \n \"Hurry up, Skkiru.\"\n \n \n\n \n Bbulas slid the ornate headdress over his antennae, which, already gilded and jeweled, at once seemed to become a part of it. He looked pretty damn silly, Skkiru thought, at the same time conscious of his own appearance\u2014which was, although picturesque enough to delight romantic Terrestrial hearts, sufficiently wretched to charm the most hardened sadist.\n \n \"Hurry up, Skkiru,\" Bbulas said. \"They mustn't suspect the existence of the city underground or we're finished before we've started.\"\n \n \"For my part, I wish we'd never started,\" Skkiru grumbled. \"What was wrong with our old culture, anyway?\"\n \n That was intended as a rhetorical question, but Bbulas answered it anyway. He always answered questions; it had never seemed to penetrate his mind that school-days were long since over.\n \n \"I've told you a thousand times that our old culture was too much like the Terrans' own to be of interest to them,\" he said, with affected weariness. \"After all, most civilized societies are basically similar; it is only primitive societies that differ sharply, one from the other\u2014and we have to be different to attract Earthmen. They're pretty choosy. You've got to give them what they want, and that's what they want. Now take up your post on the edge of the field, try to look hungry, and remember this isn't for you or for me, but for Snaddra.\"\n \n \"For Snaddra,\" Larhgan said, placing her hand over her anterior heart in a gesture which, though devout on Earth\u2014or so the fictapes seemed to indicate\u2014was obscene on Snaddra, owing to the fact that certain essential organs were located in different areas in the Snaddrath than in the corresponding Terrestrial life-form. Already the Terrestrial influence was corrupting her, Skkiru thought mournfully. She had been such a nice girl, too.\n \n \"We may never meet on equal terms again, Skkiru,\" she told him, with a long, soulful glance that made his hearts sink down to his quivering toes, \"but I promise you there will never be anyone else for me\u2014and I hope that knowledge will inspire you to complete cooperation with Bbulas.\"\n \n \"If that doesn't,\" Bbulas said, \"I have other methods of inspiration.\"\n \n \"All right,\" Skkiru answered sulkily. \"I'll go to the edge of the field, and I'll speak broken Inter-galactic, and I'll forsake my normal habits and customs, and I'll even beg . But I don't have to like doing it, and I don't intend to like doing it.\"\n \n All three of Larhgan's eyes fuzzed with emotion. \"I'm proud of you, Skkiru,\" she said brokenly.\n \n Bbulas sniffed. The three of them floated up to ground level in a triple silence.\n \n \n\n \n \"Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd,\" Skkiru chanted, as the two Terrans descended from the ship and plowed their way through the mud to meet a procession of young Snaddrath dressed in elaborate ceremonial costumes, and singing a popular ballad\u2014to which less ribald, as well as less inspiring, words than the originals had been fitted by Bbulas, just in case, by some extremely remote chance, the Terrans had acquired a smattering of Snadd somewhere. Since neither party was accustomed to navigating mud, their progress was almost imperceptible.\n \n \"Alms, for the love of Ipsnadd,\" chanted Skkiru the beggar. His teeth chattered as he spoke, for the rags he wore had been custom-weatherbeaten for him by the planet's best tailor\u2014now a pariah, of course, because Snadd tailors were, naturally, metal-workers\u2014and the wind and the rain were joyously making their way through the demolished wires. Never before had Skkiru been on the surface of the planet, except to pass over, and he had actually touched it only when taking off and landing. The Snaddrath had no means of land transport, having previously found it unnecessary\u2014but now both air-cars and self-levitation were on the prohibited list as being insufficiently primitive.\n \n The outside was no place for a civilized human being, particularly in the wet season or\u2014more properly speaking on Snaddra\u2014the wetter season. Skkiru's feet were soaked with mud; not that the light sandals worn by the members of the procession appeared to be doing them much good, either. It gave him a kind of melancholy pleasure to see that the privileged ones were likewise trying to repress shivers. Though their costumes were rich, they were also scanty, particularly in the case of the females, for Earthmen had been reported by tape and tale to be humanoid.\n \n As the mud clutched his toes, Skkiru remembered an idea he had once gotten from an old sporting fictape of Terrestrial origin and had always planned to experiment with, but had never gotten around to\u2014the weather had always been so weathery, there were so many other more comfortable sports, Larhgan had wanted him to spend more of his leisure hours with her, and so on. However, he still had the equipment, which he'd salvaged from a wrecked air-car, in his apartment\u2014and it was the matter of a moment to run down, while Bbulas was looking the other way, and get it.\n \n Bbulas couldn't really object, Skkiru stilled the nagging quiver in his toe, because what could be more primitive than any form of land transport? And even though it took time to get the things, they worked so well that, in spite of the procession's head start, he was at the Earth ship long before the official greeters had reached it.\n \n \n\n \n The newcomers were indeed humanoid, he saw. Only the peculiarly pasty color of their skins and their embarrassing lack of antennae distinguished them visibly from the Snaddrath. They were dressed much as the Snaddrath had been before they had adopted primitive garb.\n \n In fact, the Terrestrials were quite decent-looking life-forms, entirely different from the foppish monsters Skkiru had somehow expected to represent the cultural ruling race. Of course, he had frequently seen pictures of them, but everyone knew how easily those could be retouched. Why, it was the Terrestrials themselves, he had always understood, who had invented the art of retouching\u2014thus proving beyond a doubt that they had something to hide.\n \n \"Look, Raoul,\" the older of the two Earthmen said in Terran\u2014which the Snaddrath were not, according to the master plan, supposed to understand, but which most of them did, for it was the fashionable third language on most of the outer planets. \"A beggar. Haven't seen one since some other chaps and I were doing a spot of field work on that little planet in the Arcturus system\u2014what was its name? Glotch, that's it. Very short study, it turned out to be. Couldn't get more than a pamphlet out of it, as we were unable to stay long enough to amass enough material for a really definitive work. The natives tried to eat us, so we had to leave in somewhat of a hurry.\"\n \n \"Oh, they were cannibals?\" the other Earthman asked, so respectfully that it was easy to deduce he was the subordinate of the two. \"How horrible!\"\n \n \"No, not at all,\" the other assured him. \"They weren't human\u2014another species entirely\u2014so you could hardly call it cannibalism. In fact, it was quite all right from the ethical standpoint, but abstract moral considerations seemed less important to us than self-preservation just then. Decided that, in this case, it would be best to let the missionaries get first crack at them. Soften them up, you know.\"\n \n \"And the missionaries\u2014did they soften them up, Cyril?\"\n \n \"They softened up the missionaries, I believe.\" Cyril laughed. \"Ah, well, it's all in the day's work.\"\n \n \"I hope these creatures are not man-eaters,\" Raoul commented, with a polite smile at Cyril and an apprehensive glance at the oncoming procession\u2014 creatures indeed ! Skkiru thought, with a mental sniff.\n\"We have come such a long and expensive way to study them that it would be indeed a pity if we also were forced to depart in haste. Especially since this is my first field trip and I would like to make good at it.\"\n \n \"Oh, you will, my boy, you will.\" Cyril clapped the younger man on the shoulder. \"I have every confidence in your ability.\"\n \n Either he was stupid, Skkiru thought, or he was lying, in spite of Bbulas' asseverations that untruth was unknown to Terrestrials\u2014which had always seemed highly improbable, anyway. How could any intelligent life-form possibly stick to the truth all the time? It wasn't human; it wasn't even humanoid; it wasn't even polite.\n \n \"The natives certainly appear to be human enough,\" Raoul added, with an appreciative glance at the females, who had been selected for the processional honor with a view to reported Terrestrial tastes. \"Some slight differences, of course\u2014but, if two eyes are beautiful, three eyes can be fifty per cent lovelier, and chartreuse has always been my favorite color.\"\n  If they stand out here in the cold much longer, they are going to turn bright yellow. His own skin, Skkiru knew, had faded from its normal healthy emerald to a sickly celadon.\n \n \n\n \n Cyril frowned and his companion's smile vanished, as if the contortion of his superior's face had activated a circuit somewhere. Maybe the little one's a robot! However, it couldn't be\u2014a robot would be better constructed and less interested in females than Raoul.\n \n \"Remember,\" Cyril said sternly, \"we must not establish undue rapport with the native females. It tends to detract from true objectivity.\"\n \n \"Yes, Cyril,\" Raoul said meekly.\n \n Cyril assumed a more cheerful aspect \"I should like to give this chap something for old times' sake. What do you suppose is the medium of exchange here?\"\n  Money , Skkiru said to himself, but he didn't dare contribute this piece of information, helpful though it would be.\n \n \"How should I know?\" Raoul shrugged.\n \n \"Empathize. Get in there, old chap, and start batting.\"\n \n \"Why not give him a bar of chocolate, then?\" Raoul suggested grumpily.\n\"The language of the stomach, like the language of love, is said to be a universal one.\"\n \n \"Splendid idea! I always knew you had it in you, Raoul!\"\n \n Skkiru accepted the candy with suitable\u2014and entirely genuine\u2014murmurs of gratitude. Chocolate was found only in the most expensive of the planet's delicacy shops\u2014and now neither delicacy shops nor chocolate were to be found, so, if Bbulas thought he was going to save the gift to contribute it later to the Treasury, the \"high priest\" was off his rocker.\n \n To make sure there would be no subsequent dispute about possession, Skkiru ate the candy then and there. Chocolate increased the body's resistance to weather, and never before had he had to endure so much weather all at once.\n \n On Earth, he had heard, where people lived exposed to weather, they often sickened of it and passed on\u2014which helped to solve the problem of birth control on so vulgarly fecund a planet. Snaddra, alas, needed no such measures, for its population\u2014like its natural resources\u2014was dwindling rapidly. Still, Skkiru thought, as he moodily munched on the chocolate, it would have been better to flicker out on their own than to descend to a subterfuge like this for nothing more than survival.\n \n \n\n \n Being a beggar, Skkiru discovered, did give him certain small, momentary advantages over those who had been alloted higher ranks. For one thing, it was quite in character for him to tread curiously upon the strangers' heels all the way to the temple\u2014a ramshackle affair, but then it had been run up in only three days\u2014where the official reception was to be held. The principal difficulty was that, because of his equipment, he had a little trouble keeping himself from overshooting the strangers. And though Bbulas might frown menacingly at him\u2014and not only for his forwardness\u2014that was in character on both sides, too.\n \n Nonetheless, Skkiru could not reconcile himself to his beggarhood, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by thinking at least he wasn't a pariah like the unfortunate metal-workers who had to stand segregated from the rest by a chain of their own devising\u2014a poetic thought, that was, but well in keeping with his beggarhood. Beggars were often poets, he believed, and poets almost always beggars. Since metal-working was the chief industry of Snaddra, this had provided the planet automatically with a large lowest caste. Bbulas had taken the easy way out.\n \n Skkiru swallowed the last of the chocolate and regarded the \"high priest\" with a simple-minded mendicant's grin. However, there were volcanic passions within him that surged up from his toes when, as the wind and rain whipped through his scanty coverings, he remembered the snug underskirts Bbulas was wearing beneath his warm gown. They were metal, but they were solid. All the garments visible or potentially visible were of woven metal, because, although there was cloth on the planet, it was not politic for the Earthmen to discover how heavily the Snaddrath depended upon imports.\n \n As the Earthmen reached the temple, Larhgan now appeared to join Bbulas at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to it. Although Skkiru had seen her in her priestly apparel before, it had not made the emotional impression upon him then that it did now, when, standing there, clad in beauty, dignity and warm clothes, she bade the newcomers welcome in several thousand words not too well chosen for her by Bbulas\u2014who fancied himself a speech-writer as well as a speech-maker, for there was no end to the man's conceit.\n \n The difference between her magnificent garments and his own miserable rags had their full impact upon Skkiru at this moment. He saw the gulf that had been dug between them and, for the first time in his short life, he felt the tormenting pangs of caste distinction. She looked so lovely and so remote.\n \n \"... and so you are most welcome to Snaddra, men of Earth,\" she was saying in her melodious voice. \"Our resources may be small but our hearts are large, and what little we have, we offer with humility and with love. We hope that you will enjoy as long and as happy a stay here as you did on Nemeth....\"\n \n Cyril looked at Raoul, who, however, seemed too absorbed in contemplating Larhgan's apparently universal charms to pay much attention to the expression on his companion's face.\n \n \"... and that you will carry our affection back to all the peoples of the Galaxy.\"\n \n \n\n \n She had finished. And now Cyril cleared his throat. \"Dear friends, we were honored by your gracious invitation to visit this fair planet, and we are honored now by the cordial reception you have given to us.\"\n \n The crowd yoomped politely. After a slight start, Cyril went on, apparently deciding that applause was all that had been intended.\n \n \"We feel quite sure that we are going to derive both pleasure and profit from our stay here, and we promise to make our intensive analysis of your culture as painless as possible. We wish only to study your society, not to tamper with it in any way.\"\n  Ha, ha , Skkiru said to himself. Ha, ha, ha!\n \n \n \"But why is it,\" Raoul whispered in Terran as he glanced around out of the corners of his eyes, \"that only the beggar wears mudshoes?\"\n \n \"Shhh,\" Cyril hissed back. \"We'll find out later, when we've established rapport. Don't be so impatient!\"\n \n Bbulas gave a sickly smile. Skkiru could almost find it in his hearts to feel sorry for the man.\n \n \"We have prepared our best hut for you, noble sirs,\" Bbulas said with great self-control, \"and, by happy chance, this very evening a small but unusually interesting ceremony will be held outside the temple. We hope you will be able to attend. It is to be a rain dance.\"\n \n \"Rain dance!\" Raoul pulled his macintosh together more tightly at the throat. \"But why do you want rain? My faith, not only does it rain now, but the planet seems to be a veritable sea of mud. Not, of course,\" he added hurriedly as Cyril's reproachful eye caught his, \"that it is not attractive mud. Finest mud I have ever seen. Such texture, such color, such aroma!\"\n \n Cyril nodded three times and gave an appreciative sniff.\n \n \"But,\" Raoul went on, \"one can have too much of even such a good thing as mud....\"\n \n The smile did not leave Bbulas' smooth face. \"Yes, of course, honorable Terrestrials. That is why we are holding this ceremony. It is not a dance to bring on rain. It is a dance to stop rain.\"\n \n He was pretty quick on the uptake, Skkiru had to concede. However, that was not enough. The man had no genuine organizational ability. In the time he'd had in which to plan and carry out a scheme for the improvement of Snaddra, surely he could have done better than this high-school theocracy. For one thing, he could have apportioned the various roles so that each person would be making a definite contribution to the society, instead of creating some positions plums, like the priesthood, and others prunes, like the beggarship.\n \n What kind of life was that for an active, ambitious young man, standing around begging? And, moreover, from whom was Skkiru going to beg? Only the Earthmen, for the Snaddrath, no matter how much they threw themselves into the spirit of their roles, could not be so carried away that they would give handouts to a young man whom they had been accustomed to see basking in the bosom of luxury.\n \n \n\n \n Unfortunately, the fees that he'd received in the past had not enabled him both to live well and to save, and now that his fortunes had been so drastically reduced, he seemed in a fair way of starving to death. It gave him a gentle, moody pleasure to envisage his own funeral, although, at the same time, he realized that Bbulas would probably have to arrange some sort of pension for him; he could not expect Skkiru's patriotism to extend to abnormal limits. A man might be willing to die for his planet in many ways\u2014but wantonly starving to death as the result of a primitive affectation was hardly one of them.\n \n All the same, Skkiru reflected as he watched the visitors being led off to the native hut prepared for them, how ignominious it would be for one of the brightest young architects on the planet to have to subsist miserably on the dole just because the world had gone aboveground. The capital had risen to the surface and the other cities would soon follow suit. Meanwhile, a careful system of tabus had been designed to keep the Earthmen from discovering the existence of those other cities.\n \n He could, of course, emigrate to another part of the planet, to one of them, and stave off his doom for a while\u2014but that would not be playing the game. Besides, in such a case, he wouldn't be able to see Larhgan.\n \n As if all this weren't bad enough, he had been done an injury which struck directly at his professional pride. He hadn't even been allowed to help in planning the huts. Bbulas and some workmen had done all that themselves with the aid of some antique blueprints that had been put out centuries before by a Terrestrial magazine and had been acquired from a rare tape-and-book dealer on Gambrell, for, Skkiru thought, far too high a price. He could have designed them himself just as badly and much more cheaply.\n \n It wasn't that Skkiru didn't understand well enough that Snaddra had been forced into making such a drastic change in its way of life. What resources it once possessed had been depleted and\u2014aside from minerals\u2014they had never been very extensive to begin with. All life-forms on the planet were on the point of extinction, save fish and rice\u2014the only vegetable that would grow on Snaddra, and originally a Terran import at that. So food and fiber had to be brought from the other planets, at fabulous expense, for Snaddra was not on any of the direct trade routes and was too unattractive to lure the tourist business.\n \n Something definitely had to be done, if it were not to decay altogether. And that was where the Planetary Dilettante came in.\n \n \n\n \n The traditional office of Planetary Dilettante was a civil-service job, awarded by competitive examination whenever it fell vacant to the person who scored highest in intelligence, character and general gloonatz. However, the tests were inadequate when it came to measuring sense of proportion, adaptiveness and charm\u2014and there, Skkiru felt, was where the essential flaw lay. After all, no really effective test would have let a person like Bbulas come out on top.\n \n The winner was sent to Gambrell, the nearest planet with a Terran League University, to be given a thorough Terran-type education. No individual on Snaddra could afford such schooling, no matter how great his personal fortune, because the transportation costs were so immense that only a government could afford them. That was the reason why only one person in each generation could be chosen to go abroad at the planet's expense and acquire enough finish to cover the rest of the population.\n \n The Dilettante's official function had always been, in theory, to serve the planet when an emergency came\u2014and this, old Luccar, the former President, had decided, when he and the Parliament had awakened to the fact that Snaddra was falling into ruin, was an emergency. So he had, after considerable soul-searching, called upon Bbulas to plan a method of saving Snaddra\u2014and Bbulas, happy to be in the limelight at last, had come up with this program.\n \n It was not one Skkiru himself would have chosen. It was not one, he felt, that any reasonable person would have chosen. Nevertheless, the Bbulas Plan had been adopted by a majority vote of the Snaddrath, largely because no one had come up with a feasible alternative and, as a patriotic citizen, Skkiru would abide by it. He would accept the status of beggar; it was his duty to do so. Moreover, as in the case of the planet, there was no choice.\n \n But all was not necessarily lost, he told himself. Had he not, in his anthropological viewings\u2014though Bbulas might have been the only one privileged to go on ethnological field trips to other planets, he was not the only one who could use a library\u2014seen accounts of societies where beggarhood could be a rewarding and even responsible station in life? There was no reason why, within the framework of the primitive society Bbulas had created to allure Terran anthropologists, Skkiru should not make something of himself and show that a beggar was worthy of the high priestess's hand\u2014which would be entirely in the Terran primitive tradition of romance.\n \n \"Skkiru!\" Bbulas was screaming, as he spun, now that the Terrans were out of ear- and eye-shot \"Skkiru, you idiot, listen to me! What are those ridiculous things you are wearing on your silly feet?\"\n \n Skkiru protruded all of his eyes in innocent surprise. \"Just some old pontoons I took from a wrecked air-car once. I have a habit of collecting junk and I thought\u2014\"\n \n Bbulas twirled madly in the air. \"You are not supposed to think. Leave all the thinking to me!\"\n \n \"Yes, Bbulas,\" Skkiru said meekly.\n\nQuestion:\nDescribe the setting of the story, Snaddra.\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30619, "query_start_index": 30621, "query_end_index": 30674, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Snaddra is a muddy and rainy planet with limited natural resources, and a race of people who live in underground cities. There is so much mud that neither the Terrans nor the Snaddrath can move very quickly on the surface. The depleting resources of the planet means that there are only a few things that can grow on the surface, rice and fish. Rice is itself an import from Earth, and a lot of resources are acquired through trade. The Snaddrath people live in underground cities, but they have erected buildings on the surface as well for the sake of their plan to convince the Earthmen of their facade. "}
{"id": "51650_3", "pid": "51650_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nINNOCENT AT LARGE\n \n \n By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON\n \n Illustrated by WOOD\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\n \n\n \n The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise\u2014or had it been the chairman of the board?\u2014back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips.\n \n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.\n \n She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\" she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and\u2014Oh. It's you.\"\n \n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date tonight.\"\n \n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\n \n \n\n \n Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"\n \n Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n \n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"\n \n Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby.\"\n \n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n \n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three\u2014\"\n \n \"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\n \n \n\n \n The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n \n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014recruiting.\"\n \n The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. \"I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?\"\n \n \"Oh, we don't expect immigration,\" said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. \"We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire\u2014\u2014uh, I mean engage\u2014an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some\u2014a five-year contract...?\"\n \n He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself.\n \n \"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks\u2014um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I\u2014we need\u2014that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by.\"\n \n He backed out of the office.\n \n \n\n \n A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement!\n \n \n The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but\u2014he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero.\n  Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\n \n \n He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now\u2014in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea\u2014but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown\u2014\n  My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man!\n \n \n He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever.\n \n The city roared at him.\n \n He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\n \n \n He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood.\n \n The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\n \n \n\n \n Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity.\n \n \n THE CHURCH OF CHOICE\n   Enter, Play, Pray\n \n \n That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n \n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in\u2014\"\n \n \"To your left, sir.\"\n \n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n \n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n \n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n \n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.\n \n He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n \n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n \n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice.\n \n \"But\u2014I mean\u2014when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?\"\n \n \n\n \n The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir! This is a church!\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014I see\u2014excuse me, I, I, I\u2014\" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n \n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n \n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is\u2014\" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\n \n \n The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers.\n \n \"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.\n \n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I\u2014\" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n \n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n \n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n \n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n \n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.\n \n \"I don't want to\u2014I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran\u2014\"\n \n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n \n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n \n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.\"\n \n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?\"\n \n \"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n \n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\n \n \n\n \n He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve\u2014\n \n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"\n \n \"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n \n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor\u2014a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies\u2014which can only be paid for in Earth dollars\u2014and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"\n \n By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n \n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?\"\n \n \"Uh, yes, but\u2014well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n \n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n \n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n \n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"\n \n Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n \n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n \n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean\u2014well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?\"\n \n \"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes\u2014there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n \n \"Have you not got some other business?\"\n \n \"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful\u2014 I Was a Slave Girl on Mars .\n \n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around\u2014you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars\u2014but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"\n \n \"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big business, I have heard.\"\n \n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or\u2014or anybody\u2014who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars\u2014why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state\u2014what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?\"\n \n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n \n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n \n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"\n \n \"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n \n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n \n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n \n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist.\"\n  Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\n \n \n The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.\n \n \"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n \n \"A pleasure.\"\n \n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n \n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with the situation as you have been describing\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.\"\n \n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business, then?\"\n \n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.\"\n \n \"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets\u2014uh, taxes\u2014and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\n \n \n\n \n Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and\u2014and\u2014well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.\"\n \n Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.\n \n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see\u2014\"\n \n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n \n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.\"\n \n \"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n \n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n \n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts....\n \n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"\n \n A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.\n \n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want\u2014I mean what Mars really needs, get me?\u2014is a confidence man.\"\n \n \"A what?\"\n \n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.\"\n \n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n \n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\n \n \n\n \n Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.\"\n \n \"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.\n \n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n \n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n \n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some gaiety.\"\n \n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n \n \" Allez ,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors .\"\n \n The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\n  Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble.\n \n \n And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n \n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell\u2014Oh.\" He tried to grin, but his face burned. \"I see.\"\n \n \"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n2100 hours earliest.\"\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n \n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is\u2014\" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.\n \n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.\"\n \n \"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate\u2014\"\n \n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does she?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014well, no. I guess not No.\"\n \n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\n \n \n\n \n While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n \n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n \n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"\n \n \"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n \n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n \n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n\"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.\"\n \n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively.\"\n \n Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious.\n \n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n \n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n \n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n \n \"What? But\u2014but\u2014\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n \n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation.\n \n \"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry to\u2014to\u2014I mean of course I trust you, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange\u2014Go ahead, boy, go ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n \n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are operating con games.\"\n \n \"On Mars, you mean?\"\n \n \"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n \n \" Huh? Well, why, but\u2014\"\n \n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to\u2014Well, anyhow\u2014\"\n \n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n \n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.\"\n \n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember\u2014Hey! You didn't!\"\n \n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n \n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n \n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\" Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n \n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.\n \n \"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few\u2014' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n \n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already.\n \n Doran whistled.\n \n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but\u2014well, I don't know.\"\n \n \"I think\u2014\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.\n \n \"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n \n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n \n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran\u2014Gus\u2014you could actually\u2014\"\n \n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Gus Doran and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30087, "query_start_index": 30089, "query_end_index": 30150, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gus is a con artist who works with Peri and Sam Wendt to primarily target wealthy, powerful men and extort money from them. He is short, chisel-faced, has slicked-back hair, and wears blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak, and slippers. When the story begins, Peri is preparing to go on a date with the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc. who is also a wealthy marijuana rancher, supposedly to use him for money. Gus convinces her to change her plans to help him swindle Peter since he has discovered Peter has a hundred million dollars at his disposal and appears to be susceptible to Gus's charming and manipulative ways. Gus goads Peter into confessing his secret by providing him with beer and akvavit and gains his trust by wearing the helmet attached to the oath box. At the end of the story, Gus agrees to help Peter find his confidence man by utilizing his network of underworld contacts, but instead calls Peri to begin implementing his con."}
{"id": "51650_3", "pid": "51650_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nINNOCENT AT LARGE\n \n \n By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON\n \n Illustrated by WOOD\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\n \n\n \n The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise\u2014or had it been the chairman of the board?\u2014back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips.\n \n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.\n \n She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\" she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and\u2014Oh. It's you.\"\n \n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date tonight.\"\n \n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\n \n \n\n \n Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"\n \n Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n \n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"\n \n Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby.\"\n \n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n \n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three\u2014\"\n \n \"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\n \n \n\n \n The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n \n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014recruiting.\"\n \n The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. \"I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?\"\n \n \"Oh, we don't expect immigration,\" said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. \"We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire\u2014\u2014uh, I mean engage\u2014an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some\u2014a five-year contract...?\"\n \n He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself.\n \n \"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks\u2014um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I\u2014we need\u2014that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by.\"\n \n He backed out of the office.\n \n \n\n \n A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement!\n \n \n The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but\u2014he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero.\n  Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\n \n \n He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now\u2014in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea\u2014but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown\u2014\n  My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man!\n \n \n He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever.\n \n The city roared at him.\n \n He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\n \n \n He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood.\n \n The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\n \n \n\n \n Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity.\n \n \n THE CHURCH OF CHOICE\n   Enter, Play, Pray\n \n \n That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n \n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in\u2014\"\n \n \"To your left, sir.\"\n \n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n \n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n \n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n \n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.\n \n He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n \n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n \n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice.\n \n \"But\u2014I mean\u2014when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?\"\n \n \n\n \n The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir! This is a church!\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014I see\u2014excuse me, I, I, I\u2014\" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n \n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n \n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is\u2014\" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\n \n \n The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers.\n \n \"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.\n \n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I\u2014\" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n \n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n \n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n \n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n \n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.\n \n \"I don't want to\u2014I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran\u2014\"\n \n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n \n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n \n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.\"\n \n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?\"\n \n \"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n \n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\n \n \n\n \n He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve\u2014\n \n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"\n \n \"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n \n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor\u2014a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies\u2014which can only be paid for in Earth dollars\u2014and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"\n \n By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n \n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?\"\n \n \"Uh, yes, but\u2014well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n \n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n \n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n \n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"\n \n Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n \n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n \n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean\u2014well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?\"\n \n \"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes\u2014there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n \n \"Have you not got some other business?\"\n \n \"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful\u2014 I Was a Slave Girl on Mars .\n \n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around\u2014you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars\u2014but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"\n \n \"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big business, I have heard.\"\n \n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or\u2014or anybody\u2014who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars\u2014why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state\u2014what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?\"\n \n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n \n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n \n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"\n \n \"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n \n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n \n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n \n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist.\"\n  Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\n \n \n The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.\n \n \"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n \n \"A pleasure.\"\n \n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n \n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with the situation as you have been describing\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.\"\n \n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business, then?\"\n \n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.\"\n \n \"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets\u2014uh, taxes\u2014and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\n \n \n\n \n Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and\u2014and\u2014well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.\"\n \n Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.\n \n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see\u2014\"\n \n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n \n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.\"\n \n \"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n \n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n \n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts....\n \n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"\n \n A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.\n \n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want\u2014I mean what Mars really needs, get me?\u2014is a confidence man.\"\n \n \"A what?\"\n \n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.\"\n \n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n \n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\n \n \n\n \n Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.\"\n \n \"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.\n \n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n \n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n \n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some gaiety.\"\n \n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n \n \" Allez ,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors .\"\n \n The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\n  Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble.\n \n \n And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n \n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell\u2014Oh.\" He tried to grin, but his face burned. \"I see.\"\n \n \"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n2100 hours earliest.\"\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n \n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is\u2014\" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.\n \n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.\"\n \n \"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate\u2014\"\n \n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does she?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014well, no. I guess not No.\"\n \n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\n \n \n\n \n While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n \n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n \n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"\n \n \"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n \n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n \n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n\"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.\"\n \n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively.\"\n \n Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious.\n \n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n \n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n \n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n \n \"What? But\u2014but\u2014\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n \n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation.\n \n \"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry to\u2014to\u2014I mean of course I trust you, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange\u2014Go ahead, boy, go ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n \n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are operating con games.\"\n \n \"On Mars, you mean?\"\n \n \"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n \n \" Huh? Well, why, but\u2014\"\n \n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to\u2014Well, anyhow\u2014\"\n \n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n \n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.\"\n \n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember\u2014Hey! You didn't!\"\n \n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n \n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n \n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\" Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n \n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.\n \n \"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few\u2014' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n \n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already.\n \n Doran whistled.\n \n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but\u2014well, I don't know.\"\n \n \"I think\u2014\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.\n \n \"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n \n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n \n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran\u2014Gus\u2014you could actually\u2014\"\n \n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Gus Doran and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30087, "query_start_index": 30089, "query_end_index": 30150, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gus is a con-man who works with a woman named Peri. He uses his natural charisma to speak to men with money and try to get them to call Peri to have a little fun with her. His research and his ability to talk to all kinds of people puts her in touch with wealthy individuals that spend a lot of money on her. She then splits the profits with Gus. Gus introduces himself to Peter because he seems out of place at the Church of Choice. He can tell by his old clothes and height that he is a Martian, and he acts as though he is genuinely interested in learning about Peter's life on Mars and his business mission. The reality is that Gus sees that Peter is an oddball and decides to learn more about him in case he would make a good victim. Through his conversations with Peter, he learns that he is working for the Martian government, and he decides to hook Peter up with Peri so that they can take advantage of Peter's naivety. "}
{"id": "51650_3", "pid": "51650_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nINNOCENT AT LARGE\n \n \n By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON\n \n Illustrated by WOOD\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\n \n\n \n The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise\u2014or had it been the chairman of the board?\u2014back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips.\n \n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.\n \n She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\" she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and\u2014Oh. It's you.\"\n \n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date tonight.\"\n \n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\n \n \n\n \n Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"\n \n Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n \n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"\n \n Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby.\"\n \n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n \n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three\u2014\"\n \n \"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\n \n \n\n \n The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n \n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014recruiting.\"\n \n The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. \"I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?\"\n \n \"Oh, we don't expect immigration,\" said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. \"We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire\u2014\u2014uh, I mean engage\u2014an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some\u2014a five-year contract...?\"\n \n He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself.\n \n \"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks\u2014um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I\u2014we need\u2014that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by.\"\n \n He backed out of the office.\n \n \n\n \n A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement!\n \n \n The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but\u2014he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero.\n  Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\n \n \n He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now\u2014in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea\u2014but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown\u2014\n  My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man!\n \n \n He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever.\n \n The city roared at him.\n \n He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\n \n \n He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood.\n \n The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\n \n \n\n \n Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity.\n \n \n THE CHURCH OF CHOICE\n   Enter, Play, Pray\n \n \n That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n \n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in\u2014\"\n \n \"To your left, sir.\"\n \n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n \n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n \n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n \n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.\n \n He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n \n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n \n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice.\n \n \"But\u2014I mean\u2014when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?\"\n \n \n\n \n The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir! This is a church!\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014I see\u2014excuse me, I, I, I\u2014\" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n \n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n \n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is\u2014\" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\n \n \n The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers.\n \n \"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.\n \n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I\u2014\" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n \n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n \n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n \n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n \n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.\n \n \"I don't want to\u2014I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran\u2014\"\n \n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n \n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n \n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.\"\n \n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?\"\n \n \"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n \n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\n \n \n\n \n He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve\u2014\n \n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"\n \n \"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n \n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor\u2014a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies\u2014which can only be paid for in Earth dollars\u2014and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"\n \n By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n \n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?\"\n \n \"Uh, yes, but\u2014well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n \n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n \n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n \n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"\n \n Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n \n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n \n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean\u2014well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?\"\n \n \"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes\u2014there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n \n \"Have you not got some other business?\"\n \n \"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful\u2014 I Was a Slave Girl on Mars .\n \n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around\u2014you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars\u2014but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"\n \n \"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big business, I have heard.\"\n \n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or\u2014or anybody\u2014who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars\u2014why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state\u2014what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?\"\n \n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n \n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n \n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"\n \n \"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n \n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n \n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n \n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist.\"\n  Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\n \n \n The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.\n \n \"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n \n \"A pleasure.\"\n \n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n \n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with the situation as you have been describing\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.\"\n \n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business, then?\"\n \n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.\"\n \n \"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets\u2014uh, taxes\u2014and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\n \n \n\n \n Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and\u2014and\u2014well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.\"\n \n Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.\n \n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see\u2014\"\n \n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n \n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.\"\n \n \"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n \n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n \n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts....\n \n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"\n \n A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.\n \n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want\u2014I mean what Mars really needs, get me?\u2014is a confidence man.\"\n \n \"A what?\"\n \n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.\"\n \n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n \n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\n \n \n\n \n Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.\"\n \n \"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.\n \n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n \n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n \n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some gaiety.\"\n \n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n \n \" Allez ,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors .\"\n \n The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\n  Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble.\n \n \n And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n \n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell\u2014Oh.\" He tried to grin, but his face burned. \"I see.\"\n \n \"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n2100 hours earliest.\"\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n \n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is\u2014\" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.\n \n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.\"\n \n \"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate\u2014\"\n \n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does she?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014well, no. I guess not No.\"\n \n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\n \n \n\n \n While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n \n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n \n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"\n \n \"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n \n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n \n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n\"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.\"\n \n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively.\"\n \n Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious.\n \n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n \n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n \n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n \n \"What? But\u2014but\u2014\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n \n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation.\n \n \"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry to\u2014to\u2014I mean of course I trust you, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange\u2014Go ahead, boy, go ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n \n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are operating con games.\"\n \n \"On Mars, you mean?\"\n \n \"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n \n \" Huh? Well, why, but\u2014\"\n \n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to\u2014Well, anyhow\u2014\"\n \n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n \n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.\"\n \n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember\u2014Hey! You didn't!\"\n \n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n \n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n \n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\" Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n \n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.\n \n \"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few\u2014' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n \n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already.\n \n Doran whistled.\n \n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but\u2014well, I don't know.\"\n \n \"I think\u2014\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.\n \n \"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n \n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n \n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran\u2014Gus\u2014you could actually\u2014\"\n \n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Gus Doran and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30087, "query_start_index": 30089, "query_end_index": 30150, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gus Doran is a confidence man on Earth. He knows Peri and uses her \u201cservices\u201d for individuals with a lot of money whom he thinks he can use for his own personal gains. He interacts directly with the \u201cmark\u201d to gain the man\u2019s confidence, lower his defenses, and trick him into giving part of his money to Doran. At the story\u2019s beginning, Doran arranges for Peri to be available for the Martian diplomat with the hundred million dollar expense account. Doran intends to win the man\u2019s confidence and then bilk him of one million dollars. Gus \u201cmeets\u201d Peter Matheny, the diplomat from Mars, at the gaming tables of the church and invites him to have a drink. Gus wins Matheny\u2019s confidence so that Matheny reveals the dollar deficit that Mars is experiencing and the planet\u2019s desire to hire a manager to help it build up its tourist industry. One way Gus builds this confidence is through empathetic responses. Matheny reveals that while Mars produces vermouth that is bought and served on Earth, he can\u2019t stand the stuff. Gus responds that he can\u2019t stand the stuff either but has always been afraid to admit it. Matheny explains that Mars has very little profit after paying the engineers, salespeople, advertisers, and Earth taxes on its exports, and Gus acts as if he is a small-time business consultant and says maybe he can help Matheny, all the while planning to take Matheny\u2019s money. When Matheny suggests there is more he could tell him, Gus offers to use an oath box, swallows the pill, and dons the helmet to confirm that he is honest and trustworthy. When Matheny eventually admits that Mars wants a con man to run a worldwide con, Gus indicates he can help him find someone to do it.\n"}
{"id": "51650_3", "pid": "51650_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nINNOCENT AT LARGE\n \n \n By POUL AND KAREN ANDERSON\n \n Illustrated by WOOD\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Galaxy Science Fiction July 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n A hayseed Martian among big-planet slickers ... of course he would get into trouble. But that was nothing compared to the trouble he would be in if he did not get into trouble!\n \n\n \n The visiphone chimed when Peri had just gotten into her dinner gown. She peeled it off again and slipped on a casual bathrobe: a wisp of translucence which had set the president of Antarctic Enterprise\u2014or had it been the chairman of the board?\u2014back several thousand dollars. Then she pulled a lock of lion-colored hair down over one eye, checked with a mirror, rumpled it a tiny bit more and wrapped the robe loosely on top and tight around the hips.\n \n After all, some of the men who knew her private number were important.\n \n She undulated to the phone and pressed its Accept. \"Hello-o, there,\" she said automatically. \"So sorry to keep you waiting. I was just taking a bath and\u2014Oh. It's you.\"\n \n Gus Doran's prawnlike eyes popped at her. \"Holy Success,\" he whispered in awe. \"You sure the wires can carry that much voltage?\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, hurry up with whatever it is,\" snapped Peri. \"I got a date tonight.\"\n \n \"I'll say you do! With a Martian!\"\n \n \n\n \n Peri narrowed her silver-blue gaze and looked icily at him. \"You must have heard wrong, Gus. He's the heir apparent of Indonesia, Inc., that's who, and if you called up to ask for a piece of him, you can just blank right out again. I saw him first!\"\n \n Doran's thin sharp face grinned. \"You break that date, Peri. Put it off or something. I got this Martian for you, see?\"\n \n \"So? Since when has all Mars had as much spending money as one big-time marijuana rancher? Not to mention the heir ap\u2014\"\n \n \"Sure, sure. But how much are those boys going to spend on any girl, even a high-level type like you? Listen, I need you just for tonight, see? This Martian is strictly from gone. He is here on official business, but he is a yokel and I do mean hayseed. Like he asked me what the Christmas decorations in all the stores were! And here is the solar nexus of it, Peri, kid.\"\n \n Doran leaned forward as if to climb out of the screen. \"He has got a hundred million dollars expense money, and they are not going to audit his accounts at home. One hundred million good green certificates, legal tender anywhere in the United Protectorates. And he has about as much backbone as a piece of steak alga. Kid, if I did not happen to have experience otherwise with a small nephew, I would say this will be like taking candy from a baby.\"\n \n Peri's peaches-and-cream countenance began to resemble peaches and cream left overnight on Pluto. \"Badger?\" she asked.\n \n \"Sure. You and Sam Wendt handle the routine. I will take the go-between angle, so he will think of me as still his friend, because I have other plans for him too. But if we can't shake a million out of him for this one night's work, there is something akilter. And your share of a million is three hundred thirty-three\u2014\"\n \n \"Is five hundred thousand flat,\" said Peri. \"Too bad I just got an awful headache and can't see Mr. Sastro tonight. Where you at, Gus?\"\n \n \n\n \n The gravity was not as hard to take as Peter Matheny had expected. Three generations on Mars might lengthen the legs and expand the chest a trifle, but the genes had come from Earth and the organism readjusts. What set him gasping was the air. It weighed like a ton of wool and had apparently sopped up half the Atlantic Ocean. Ears trained to listen through the Martian atmosphere shuddered from the racket conducted by Earth's. The passport official seemed to bellow at him.\n \n \"Pardon me for asking this. The United Protectorates welcome all visitors to Earth and I assure you, sir, an ordinary five-year visa provokes no questions. But since you came on an official courier boat of your planet, Mr. Matheny, regulations force me to ask your business.\"\n \n \"Well\u2014recruiting.\"\n \n The official patted his comfortable stomach, iridescent in neolon, and chuckled patronizingly. \"I am afraid, sir, you won't find many people who wish to leave. They wouldn't be able to see the Teamsters Hour on Mars, would they?\"\n \n \"Oh, we don't expect immigration,\" said Matheny shyly. He was a fairly young man, but small, with a dark-thatched, snub-nosed, gray-eyed head that seemed too large for his slender body. \"We learned long ago that no one is interested any more in giving up even second-class citizenship on Earth to live in the Republic. But we only wanted to hire\u2014\u2014uh, I mean engage\u2014an, an advisor. We're not businessmen. We know our export trade hasn't a chance among all your corporations unless we get some\u2014a five-year contract...?\"\n \n He heard his words trailing off idiotically, and swore at himself.\n \n \"Well, good luck.\" The official's tone was skeptical. He stamped the passport and handed it back. \"There, now, you are free to travel anywhere in the Protectorates. But I would advise you to leave the capital and get into the sticks\u2014um, I mean the provinces. I am sure there must be tolerably competent sales executives in Russia or Congolese Belgium or such regions. Frankly, sir, I do not believe you can attract anyone out of Newer York.\"\n \n \"Thanks,\" said Matheny, \"but, you see, I\u2014we need\u2014that is.... Oh, well. Thanks. Good-by.\"\n \n He backed out of the office.\n \n \n\n \n A dropshaft deposited him on a walkway. The crowd, a rainbow of men in pajamas and robes, women in Neo-Sino dresses and goldleaf hats, swept him against the rail. For a moment, squashed to the wire, he stared a hundred feet down at the river of automobiles. Phobos! he thought wildly. If the barrier gives, I'll be sliced in two by a dorsal fin before I hit the pavement!\n \n \n The August twilight wrapped him in heat and stickiness. He could see neither stars nor even moon through the city's blaze. The forest of multi-colored towers, cataracting half a mile skyward across more acreage than his eyes reached, was impressive and all that, but\u2014he used to stroll out in the rock garden behind his cottage and smoke a pipe in company with Orion. On summer evenings, that is, when the temperature wasn't too far below zero.\n  Why did they tap me for this job? he asked himself in a surge of homesickness. What the hell is the Martian Embassy here for?\n \n \n He, Peter Matheny, was no more than a peaceful professor of sociodynamics at Devil's Kettle University. Of course, he had advised his government before now\u2014in fact, the Red Ankh Society had been his idea\u2014but still he was at ease only with his books and his chess and his mineral collection, a faculty poker party on Tenthday night and an occasional trip to Swindletown\u2014\n  My God , thought Matheny, here I am, one solitary outlander in the greatest commercial empire the human race has ever seen, and I'm supposed to find my planet a con man!\n \n \n He began walking, disconsolately, at random. His lizardskin shirt and black culottes drew glances, but derisive ones: their cut was forty years out of date. He should find himself a hotel, he thought drearily, but he wasn't tired; the spaceport would pneumo his baggage to him whenever he did check in. The few Martians who had been to Earth had gone into ecstasies over the automation which put any service you could name on a twenty-four-hour basis. But it would be a long time before Mars had such machines. If ever.\n \n The city roared at him.\n \n He fumbled after his pipe. Of course , he told himself, that's why the Embassy can't act. I may find it advisable to go outside the law. Please, sir, where can I contact the underworld?\n \n \n He wished gambling were legal on Earth. The Constitution of the Martian Republic forbade sumptuary and moral legislation; quite apart from the rambunctious individualism which that document formulated, the article was a practical necessity. Life was bleak enough on the deserts, without being denied the pleasure of trying to bottom-deal some friend who was happily trying to mark the cards. Matheny would have found a few spins of roulette soothing: it was always an intellectual challenge to work out the system by which the management operated a wheel. But more, he would have been among people he understood.\n \n The frightful thing about the Earthman was the way he seemed to exist only in organized masses. A gypsy snake oil peddler, plodding his syrtosaur wagon across Martian sands, just didn't have a prayer against, say, the Grant, Harding & Adams Public Relations Agency.\n \n \n\n \n Matheny puffed smoke and looked around. His feet ached from the weight on them. Where could a man sit down? It was hard to make out any individual sign through all that flimmering neon. His eye fell on one that was distinguished by relative austerity.\n \n \n THE CHURCH OF CHOICE\n   Enter, Play, Pray\n \n \n That would do. He took an upward slideramp through several hundred feet of altitude, stepped past an aurora curtain, and found himself in a marble lobby next to an inspirational newsstand.\n \n \"Ah, brother, welcome,\" said a red-haired usherette in demure black leotards. \"The peace that passeth all understanding be with you. The restaurant is right up those stairs.\"\n \n \"I\u2014I'm not hungry,\" stammered Matheny. \"I just wanted to sit in\u2014\"\n \n \"To your left, sir.\"\n \n The Martian crossed the lobby. His pipe went out in the breeze from an animated angel. Organ music sighed through an open doorway. The series of rooms beyond was dim, Gothic, interminable.\n \n \"Get your chips right here, sir,\" said the girl in the booth.\n \n \"Hm?\" said Matheny.\n \n She explained. He bought a few hundred-dollar tokens, dropped a fifty-buck coin down a slot marked CONTRIBUTIONS, and sipped the martini he got back while he strolled around studying the games. He stopped, frowned. Bingo? No, he didn't want to bother learning something new. He decided that the roulette wheels were either honest or too deep for him. He'd have to relax with a crap game instead.\n \n He had been standing at the table for some time before the rest of the congregation really noticed him. Then it was with awe. The first few passes he had made were unsuccessful. Earth gravity threw him off. But when he got the rhythm of it, he tossed a row of sevens. It was a customary form of challenge on Mars. Here, though, they simply pushed chips toward him. He missed a throw, as anyone would at home: simple courtesy. The next time around, he threw for a seven just to get the feel. He got a seven. The dice had not been substituted on him.\n \n \"I say!\" he exclaimed. He looked up into eyes and eyes, all around the green table. \"I'm sorry. I guess I don't know your rules.\"\n \n \"You did all right, brother,\" said a middle-aged lady with an obviously surgical bodice.\n \n \"But\u2014I mean\u2014when do we start actually playing ? What happened to the cocked dice?\"\n \n \n\n \n The lady drew herself up and jutted an indignant brow at him. \"Sir! This is a church!\"\n \n \"Oh\u2014I see\u2014excuse me, I, I, I\u2014\" Matheny backed out of the crowd, shuddering. He looked around for some place to hide his burning ears.\n \n \"You forgot your chips, pal,\" said a voice.\n \n \"Oh. Thanks. Thanks ever so much. I, I, that is\u2014\" Matheny cursed his knotting tongue. Damn it, just because they're so much more sophisticated than I, do I have to talk like a leaky boiler?\n \n \n The helpful Earthman was not tall. He was dark and chisel-faced and sleekly pomaded, dapper in blue pajamas with a red zigzag, a sleighbell cloak and curly-toed slippers.\n \n \"You're from Mars, aren't you?\" he asked in the friendliest tone Matheny had yet heard.\n \n \"Yes. Yes, I am. M-my name's Peter Matheny. I, I\u2014\" He stuck out his hand to shake and chips rolled over the floor. \"Damn! Oh, excuse me, I forgot this was a church. Never mind the chips. No, please. I just want to g-g-get the hell out of here.\"\n \n \"Good idea. How about a drink? I know a bar downshaft.\"\n \n Matheny sighed. \"A drink is what I need the very most.\"\n \n \"My name's Doran. Gus Doran. Call me Gus.\"\n \n They walked back to the deaconette's booth and Matheny cashed what remained of his winnings.\n \n \"I don't want to\u2014I mean if you're busy tonight, Mr. Doran\u2014\"\n \n \"Nah. I am not doing one thing in particular. Besides, I have never met a Martian. I am very interested.\"\n \n \"There aren't many of us on Earth,\" agreed Matheny. \"Just a small embassy staff and an occasional like me.\"\n \n \"I should think you would do a lot of traveling here. The old mother planet and so on.\"\n \n \"We can't afford it,\" said Matheny. \"What with gravitation and distance, such voyages are much too expensive for us to make them for pleasure. Not to mention our dollar shortage.\" As they entered the shaft, he added wistfully: \"You Earth people have that kind of money, at least in your more prosperous brackets. Why don't you send a few tourists to us?\"\n \n \"I always wanted to,\" said Doran. \"I would like to see the what they call City of Time, and so on. As a matter of fact, I have given my girl one of those Old Martian rings last Ike's Birthday and she was just gazoo about it. A jewel dug out of the City of Time, like, made a million years ago by a, uh, extinct race ... I tell you, she appreciated me for it!\" He winked and nudged.\n \n \"Oh,\" said Matheny.\n \n \n\n \n He felt a certain guilt. Doran was too pleasant a little man to deserve\u2014\n \n \"Of course,\" Matheny said ritually, \"I agree with all the archeologists it's a crime to sell such scientifically priceless artifacts, but what can we do? We must live, and the tourist trade is almost nonexistent.\"\n \n \"Trouble with it is, I hear Mars is not so comfortable,\" said Doran. \"I mean, do not get me wrong, I don't want to insult you or anything, but people come back saying you have given the planet just barely enough air to keep a man alive. And there are no cities, just little towns and villages and ranches out in the bush. I mean you are being pioneers and making a new nation and all that, but people paying half a megabuck for their ticket expect some comfort and, uh, you know.\"\n \n \"I do know,\" said Matheny. \"But we're poor\u2014a handful of people trying to make a world of dust and sand and scrub thorn into fields and woods and seas. We can't do it without substantial help from Earth, equipment and supplies\u2014which can only be paid for in Earth dollars\u2014and we can't export enough to Earth to earn those dollars.\"\n \n By that time, they were entering the Paul Bunyan Knotty Pine Bar & Grill, on the 73rd Level. Matheny's jaw clanked down.\n \n \"Whassa matter?\" asked Doran. \"Ain't you ever seen a ecdysiastic technician before?\"\n \n \"Uh, yes, but\u2014well, not in a 3-D image under ten magnifications.\"\n \n Matheny followed Doran past a sign announcing that this show was for purely artistic purposes, into a booth. There a soundproof curtain reduced the noise level enough so they could talk in normal voices.\n \n \"What'll you have?\" asked Doran. \"It's on me.\"\n \n \"Oh, I couldn't let you. I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Nonsense. Welcome to Earth! Care for a thyle and vermouth?\"\n \n Matheny shuddered. \"Good Lord, no!\"\n \n \"Huh? But they make thyle right on Mars, don't they?\"\n \n \"Yes. And it all goes to Earth and sells at 2000 dollars a fifth. But you don't think we'd drink it, do you? I mean\u2014well, I imagine it doesn't absolutely ruin vermouth. But we don't see those Earthside commercials about how sophisticated people like it so much.\"\n \n \n\n \n \"Well, I'll be a socialist creeper!\" Doran's face split in a grin. \"You know, all my life I've hated the stuff and never dared admit it!\" He raised a hand. \"Don't worry, I won't blabbo. But I am wondering, if you control the thyle industry and sell all those relics at fancy prices, why do you call yourselves poor?\"\n \n \"Because we are,\" said Matheny. \"By the time the shipping costs have been paid on a bottle, and the Earth wholesaler and jobber and sales engineer and so on, down to the retailer, have taken their percentage, and the advertising agency has been paid, and about fifty separate Earth taxes\u2014there's very little profit going back to the distillery on Mars. The same principle is what's strangling us on everything. Old Martian artifacts aren't really rare, for instance, but freight charges and the middlemen here put them out of the mass market.\"\n \n \"Have you not got some other business?\"\n \n \"Well, we do sell a lot of color slides, postcards, baggage labels and so on to people who like to act cosmopolitan, and I understand our travel posters are quite popular as wall decoration. But all that has to be printed on Earth, and the printer and distributor keep most of the money. We've sold some books and show tapes, of course, but only one has been really successful\u2014 I Was a Slave Girl on Mars .\n \n \"Our most prominent novelist was co-opted to ghostwrite that one. Again, though, local income taxes took most of the money; authors never have been protected the way a businessman is. We do make a high percentage of profit on those little certificates you see around\u2014you know, the title deeds to one square inch of Mars\u2014but expressed absolutely, in dollars, it doesn't amount to much when we start shopping for bulldozers and thermonuclear power plants.\"\n \n \"How about postage stamps?\" inquired Doran. \"Philately is a big business, I have heard.\"\n \n \"It was our mainstay,\" admitted Matheny, \"but it's been overworked. Martian stamps are a drug on the market. What we'd like to operate is a sweepstakes, but the anti-gambling laws on Earth forbid that.\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran whistled. \"I got to give your people credit for enterprise, anyway!\" He fingered his mustache. \"Uh, pardon me, but have you tried to, well, attract capital from Earth?\"\n \n \"Of course,\" said Matheny bitterly. \"We offer the most liberal concessions in the Solar System. Any little mining company or transport firm or\u2014or anybody\u2014who wanted to come and actually invest a few dollars in Mars\u2014why, we'd probably give him the President's daughter as security. No, the Minister of Ecology has a better-looking one. But who's interested? We haven't a thing that Earth hasn't got more of. We're only the descendants of a few scientists, a few political malcontents, oddballs who happen to prefer elbow room and a bill of liberties to the incorporated state\u2014what could General Nucleonics hope to get from Mars?\"\n \n \"I see. Well, what are you having to drink?\"\n \n \"Beer,\" said Matheny without hesitation.\n \n \"Huh? Look, pal, this is on me.\"\n \n \"The only beer on Mars comes forty million miles, with interplanetary freight charges tacked on,\" said Matheny. \"Heineken's!\"\n \n Doran shrugged, dialed the dispenser and fed it coins.\n \n \"This is a real interesting talk, Pete,\" he said. \"You are being very frank with me. I like a man that is frank.\"\n \n Matheny shrugged. \"I haven't told you anything that isn't known to every economist.\"\n  Of course I haven't. I've not so much as mentioned the Red Ankh, for instance. But, in principle, I have told him the truth, told him of our need; for even the secret operations do not yield us enough.\n \n \n The beer arrived. Matheny engulfed himself in it. Doran sipped at a whiskey sour and unobtrusively set another full bottle in front of the Martian.\n \n \"Ahhh!\" said Matheny. \"Bless you, my friend.\"\n \n \"A pleasure.\"\n \n \"But now you must let me buy you one.\"\n \n \"That is not necessary. After all,\" said Doran with great tact, \"with the situation as you have been describing\u2014\"\n \n \"Oh, we're not that poor! My expense allowance assumes I will entertain quite a bit.\"\n \n Doran's brows lifted a few minutes of arc. \"You're here on business, then?\"\n \n \"Yes. I told you we haven't any tourists. I was sent to hire a business manager for the Martian export trade.\"\n \n \"What's wrong with your own people? I mean, Pete, it is not your fault there are so many rackets\u2014uh, taxes\u2014and middlemen and agencies and et cetera. That is just the way Earth is set up these days.\"\n \n \n\n \n Matheny's finger stabbed in the general direction of Doran's pajama top. \"Exactly. And who set it up that way? Earthmen. We Martians are babes in the desert. What chance do we have to earn dollars on the scale we need them, in competition with corporations which could buy and sell our whole planet before breakfast? Why, we couldn't afford three seconds of commercial time on a Lullaby Pillow 'cast. What we need, what we have to hire, is an executive who knows Earth, who's an Earthman himself. Let him tell us what will appeal to your people, and how to dodge the tax bite and\u2014and\u2014well, you see how it goes, that sort of, uh, thing.\"\n \n Matheny felt his eloquence running down and grabbed for the second bottle of beer.\n \n \"But where do I start?\" he asked plaintively, for his loneliness smote him anew. \"I'm just a college professor at home. How would I even get to see\u2014\"\n \n \"It might be arranged,\" said Doran in a thoughtful tone. \"It just might. How much could you pay this fellow?\"\n \n \"A hundred megabucks a year, if he'll sign a five-year contract. That's Earth years, mind you.\"\n \n \"I'm sorry to tell you this, Pete,\" said Doran, \"but while that is not bad money, it is not what a high-powered sales scientist gets in Newer York. Plus his retirement benefits, which he would lose if he quit where he is now at. And I am sure he would not want to settle on Mars permanently.\"\n \n \"I could offer a certain amount of, uh, lagniappe,\" said Matheny. \"That is, well, I can draw up to a hundred megabucks myself for, uh, expenses and, well ... let me buy you a drink!\"\n \n Doran's black eyes frogged at him. \"You might at that,\" said the Earthman very softly. \"Yes, you might at that.\"\n \n Matheny found himself warming. Gus Doran was an authentic bobber. A hell of a swell chap. He explained modestly that he was a free-lance business consultant and it was barely possible that he could arrange some contacts....\n \n \"No, no, no commission, all done in the interest of interplanetary friendship ... well, anyhow, let's not talk business now. If you have got to stick to beer, Pete, make it a chaser to akvavit. What is akvavit? Well, I will just take and show you.\"\n \n A hell of a good bloke. He knew some very funny stories, too, and he laughed at Matheny's, though they were probably too rustic for a big-city taste like his.\n \n \"What I really want,\" said Matheny, \"what I really want\u2014I mean what Mars really needs, get me?\u2014is a confidence man.\"\n \n \"A what?\"\n \n \"The best and slickest one on Earth, to operate a world-size con game for us and make us some real money.\"\n \n \"Con man? Oh. A slipstring.\"\n \n \"A con by any other name,\" said Matheny, pouring down an akvavit.\n \n \n\n \n Doran squinted through cigarette smoke. \"You are interesting me strangely, my friend. Say on.\"\n \n \"No.\" Matheny realized his head was a bit smoky. The walls of the booth seemed odd, somehow. They were just leatheroid walls, but they had an odd quality.\n \n \"No, sorry, Gus,\" he said. \"I spoke too much.\"\n \n \"Okay. Forget it. I do not like a man that pries. But look, let's bomb out of here, how about it? Go have a little fun.\"\n \n \"By all means.\" Matheny disposed of his last beer. \"I could use some gaiety.\"\n \n \"You have come to the right town then. But let us get you a hotel room first and some more up-to-date clothes.\"\n \n \" Allez ,\" said Matheny. \"If I don't mean allons , or maybe alors .\"\n \n The drop down to cab-ramp level and the short ride afterward sobered him; the room rate at the Jupiter-Astoria sobered him still more.\n  Oh, well , he thought, if I succeed in this job, no one at home will quibble.\n \n \n And the chamber to which he and Doran were shown was spectacular enough, with a pneumo direct to the bar and a full-wall transparency to show the vertical incandescence of the towers.\n \n \"Whoof!\" Matheny sat down. The chair slithered sensuously about his contours. He jumped. \"What the dusty hell\u2014Oh.\" He tried to grin, but his face burned. \"I see.\"\n \n \"That is a sexy type of furniture, all right,\" agreed Doran. He lowered himself into another chair, cocked his feet on the 3-D and waved a cigarette. \"Which speaking of, what say we get some girls? It is not too late to catch them at home. A date here will usually start around\n2100 hours earliest.\"\n \n \"What?\"\n \n \"You know. Dames. Like a certain blonde warhead with twin radar and swivel mounting, and she just loves exotics. Such as you.\"\n \n \"Me?\" Matheny heard his voice climb to a schoolboy squeak. \"Me? Exotic? Why, I'm just a little college professor. I g-g-g, that is\u2014\" His tongue got stuck on his palate. He pulled it loose and moistened uncertain lips.\n \n \"You are from Mars. Okay? So you fought bushcats barehanded in an abandoned canal.\"\n \n \"What's a bushcat? And we don't have canals. The evaporation rate\u2014\"\n \n \"Look, Pete,\" said Doran patiently. \"She don't have to know that, does she?\"\n \n \"Well\u2014well, no. I guess not No.\"\n \n \"Let's order you some clothes on the pneumo,\" said Doran. \"I recommend you buy from Schwartzherz. Everybody knows he is expensive.\"\n \n \n\n \n While Matheny jittered about, shaving and showering and struggling with his new raiment, Doran kept him supplied with akvavit and beer.\n \n \"You said one thing, Pete,\" Doran remarked. \"About needing a slipstring. A con man, you would call it.\"\n \n \"Forget that. Please. I spoke out of turn.\"\n \n \"Well, you see, maybe a man like that is just what Mars does need. And maybe I have got a few contacts.\"\n \n \"What?\" Matheny gaped out of the bathroom.\n \n Doran cupped his hands around a fresh cigarette, not looking at him.\n\"I am not that man,\" he said frankly. \"But in my line I get a lot of contacts, and not all of them go topside. See what I mean? Like if, say, you wanted somebody terminated and could pay for it, I could not do it. I would not want to know anything about it. But I could tell you a phone number.\"\n \n He shrugged and gave the Martian a sidelong glance. \"Sure, you may not be interested. But if you are, well, Pete, I was not born yesterday. I got tolerance. Like the book says, if you want to get ahead, you have got to think positively.\"\n \n Matheny hesitated. If only he hadn't taken that last shot! It made him want to say yes, immediately, without reservations. And therefore maybe he became overcautious.\n \n They had instructed him on Mars to take chances if he must.\n \n \"I could tell you a thing or two that might give you a better idea,\" he said slowly. \"But it would have to be under security.\"\n \n \"Okay by me. Room service can send us up an oath box right now.\"\n \n \"What? But\u2014but\u2014\" Matheny hung onto himself and tried to believe that he had landed on Earth less than six hours ago.\n \n In the end, he did call room service and the machine was trundled in. Doran swallowed the pill and donned the conditioner helmet without an instant's hesitation.\n \n \"I shall never reveal to any person unauthorized by yourself whatever you may tell me under security, now or at any other time,\" he recited. Then, cheerfully: \"And that formula, Pete, happens to be the honest-to-zebra truth.\"\n \n \"I know.\" Matheny stared, embarrassed, at the carpet. \"I'm sorry to\u2014to\u2014I mean of course I trust you, but\u2014\"\n \n \"Forget it. I take a hundred security oaths a year, in my line of work. Maybe I can help you. I like you, Pete, damn if I don't. And, sure, I might stand to get an agent's cut, if I arrange\u2014Go ahead, boy, go ahead.\" Doran crossed his legs and leaned back.\n \n \"Oh, it's simple enough,\" said Matheny. \"It's only that we already are operating con games.\"\n \n \"On Mars, you mean?\"\n \n \"Yes. There never were any Old Martians. We erected the ruins fifty years ago for the Billingsworth Expedition to find. We've been manufacturing relics ever since.\"\n \n \" Huh? Well, why, but\u2014\"\n \n \"In this case, it helps to be at the far end of an interplanetary haul,\" said Matheny. \"Not many Terrestrial archeologists get to Mars and they depend on our people to\u2014Well, anyhow\u2014\"\n \n \"I will be clopped! Good for you!\"\n \n \n\n \n Doran blew up in laughter. \"That is one thing I would never spill, even without security. I told you about my girl friend, didn't I?\"\n \n \"Yes, and that calls to mind the Little Girl,\" said Matheny apologetically. \"She was another official project.\"\n \n \"Who?\"\n \n \"Remember Junie O'Brien? The little golden-haired girl on Mars, a mathematical prodigy, but dying of an incurable disease? She collected Earth coins.\"\n \n \"Oh, that. Sure, I remember\u2014Hey! You didn't!\"\n \n \"Yes. We made about a billion dollars on that one.\"\n \n \"I will be double damned. You know, Pete, I sent her a hundred-buck piece myself. Say, how is Junie O'Brien?\"\n \n \"Oh, fine. Under a different name, she's now our finance minister.\" Matheny stared out the wall, his hands twisting nervously behind his back. \"There were no lies involved. She really does have a fatal disease. So do you and I. Every day we grow older.\"\n \n \"Uh!\" exclaimed Doran.\n \n \"And then the Red Ankh Society. You must have seen or heard their ads.\n'What mysterious knowledge did the Old Martians possess? What was the secret wisdom of the Ancient Aliens? Now the incredibly powerful semantics of the Red Ankh (not a religious organization) is available to a select few\u2014' That's our largest dollar-earning enterprise.\"\n \n He would have liked to say it was his suggestion originally, but it would have been too presumptuous. He was talking to an Earthman, who had heard everything already.\n \n Doran whistled.\n \n \"That's about all, so far,\" confessed Matheny. \"Perhaps a con is our only hope. I've been wondering, maybe we could organize a Martian bucket shop, handling Martian securities, but\u2014well, I don't know.\"\n \n \"I think\u2014\" Doran removed the helmet and stood up.\n \n \"Yes?\" Matheny faced around, shivering with his own tension.\n \n \"I may be able to find the man you want,\" said Doran. \"I just may. It will take a few days and might get a little expensive.\"\n \n \"You mean.... Mr. Doran\u2014Gus\u2014you could actually\u2014\"\n \n \"I cannot promise anything yet except that I will try. Now you finish dressing. I will be down in the bar. And I will call up this girl I know. We deserve a celebration!\"\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Gus Doran and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 30087, "query_start_index": 30089, "query_end_index": 30150, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Gus Doran is an Earthman who just happens to know a lot of Earthmen. He runs into Peter Matheny, a visiting Martian, and soon realizes that he can have a hell of a time with this guy. Doran serves as Matheny\u2019s tour guide and takes him to a bar and a hotel where he can stay. When he realizes that Matheny is looking for an Earthman to serve as an executive for Mars (essentially a conman), he sees potential there. Once he realizes that Matheny has millions of dollars to spend on expenses here, he sees even more potential there. Doran propels Matheny forward and takes this slightly lost Martian on a wild journey. As well, he promises Matheny that he knows someone who could be the perfect person for this position. Doran also knows Peri, an escort, who will presumably make an entrance later on in the story. "}
{"id": "63833_2", "pid": "63833_2_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJinx Ship To The Rescue\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus.\n \n Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor.\n \n The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship.\n \n \"It looks,\" he commented bitterly, \"like a pregnant carp.\"\n \n Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley\u2014\"Cob\" to his friends\u2014nodded in agreement. \"That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality.\" Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time.\n \n \"Tell me, Captain,\" continued Cob curiously, \"how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought....\"\n \n \"You know Gorman?\" queried Strykalski.\n \n Cob nodded. \"Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?\"\n \n \"The same.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, \"I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?\" He indicated the monitor expressively.\n \n Strike sighed. \"Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition.\n \n \"The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me.\n \n \"From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you.\n \n \"In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger....\"\n \n \"The Procyon A people?\" asked Cob.\n \n \"So you've heard about it.\" Strike shook his head sadly. \"My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists.\" He shrugged. \"Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this.\"\n \n Cob coughed slightly. \"I heard something about Ley City, too.\"\n \n \"Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely.\"\n \n Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. \"That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about....\"\n \n \"Canalopolis?\"\n \n Whitley nodded.\n \n \"That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball.\"\n \n \"I begin to see what you mean, Captain.\"\n \n \"Strike's the name, Cob.\"\n \n Whitley's smile was expansive. \"Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here.\" He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. \"She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either.\"\n \n Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . \"She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her.\"\n \n Cob shrugged philosophically. \"Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Venus-Mars.\"\n \n Cob scratched his chin speculatively. \"Perihelion run. Hot work.\"\n \n Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior.\n\"A surge-circuit monitor, so help me.\"\n \n Cob nodded agreement. \"The last of her class.\"\n \n \n\n \n And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives.\n \n Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine.\n \n All three were miserable failures.\n \n The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly.\n \n The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under\n20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull.\n \n The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did....\n \n The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve.\n \n Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere.\n \n Cob sensed his discomfort. \"That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too.\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable.\"\n \n Cob shrugged. \"Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women.\" He grinned maliciously. \"Equal rights, you know.\"\n \n \"No doubt,\" commented the other sourly. \"Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?\"\n \n Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent.\n \n Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?\" commented Cob.\n \n Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. \"But she's home to us, anyway.\"\n \n The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control.\n \n \"Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty....\"\n \n Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner.\n\"Orders, Captain?\"\n \n \"We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by\n600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. \"Captain,\" he asked, \"Who is the new E/O to be?\"\n \n Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. \"A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say.\"\n \n Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. \"I. V. Hendricks.\" He shook his head. \"Don't know him.\"\n \n \n\n \n The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure.\n \n Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others.\n \n \"... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important.\"\n \n \"That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard.\" He nodded. \"That's the story. Lift ship in....\" He glanced at his wrist chronograph, \"... in an hour and five.\"\n \n The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room.\n\"Captain?\"\n \n \"Come in, Cob.\" Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway.\n \n Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. \"Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?\"\n \n Strike looked blankly at the girl.\n \n \"Our new E/O, Captain,\" prompted Whitley.\n \n \"Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks,\" was all the Captain could find to say.\n \n The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. \"Thank you, Captain.\" Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. \"If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent.\"\n \n Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. \"Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so....\"\n \n The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, \"Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father.\"\n \n \n\n \n A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall.\n \n The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury....\n \n For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman.\n \n And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy.\n \n At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102\u00b0F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing.\n \n Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan.\n \n Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so.\n \n And she agreed.\n \n \n\n \n Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135\u00b0 and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food....\n \n And then it happened.\n \n Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship.\n \n A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end.\n \n Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face.\n \n \"Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!\"\n \n \"Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!\" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head.\n \n She read it through and looked up exultantly. \"This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!\"\n \n He returned her gaze sourly. \"For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself.\"\n \n Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. \"That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!\" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"That's very nice, Lieutenant,\" commented Cob drily. \"And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too.\"\n \n \"Let me understand you, Ivy,\" said Strike in a flat voice. \"What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat.\"\n \n There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. \"But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!\" Her expression turned to one of disgust. \"Or are you afraid?\"\n \n \"Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us.\"\n \n \"We can do it,\" said Ivy Hendricks simply.\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?\"\n \n Whitley shrugged. \"If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me.\"\n \n Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. \"We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty.\"\n \n Strike turned to the squawk-box. \"Evans!\"\n \n \"Evans here,\" came the reply.\n \n \"Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" Cob saluted and was gone.\n \n Strike returned to the squawk-box. \"Radar!\"\n \n \"Graham here,\" replied Celia from her station.\n \n \"Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain,\" the girl replied crisply.\n \n \"Gun deck!\"\n \n \"Gun deck here, sir,\" came a feminine voice.\n \n \"Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" The girl switched off.\n \n \"And now you, Miss Hendricks.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain?\" Her voice was low.\n \n \"Take over Control ... and Ivy....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Don't kill us off.\" He smiled down at her.\n \n She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward....\n \n \n\n \n Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying.\n \n Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport.\n \n The temperature stood at 140\u00b0 and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension.\n \n Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American \"bolas,\" the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together.\n \n \n They were diving into the sun.\n \n\n \n The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145\u00b0 and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison.\n \n Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel.\n \n \" Ivy! \" Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm.\n \n \"I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all.\"\n \n Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit.\n \n Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line.\n \n More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail.\n \n Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. \"Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat.\"\n \n \"We're trying, Cob!\" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. \" Now! \" He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain....\n \n The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. \"We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're....\" And that was all.\n \n The space-tug Scylla found them.\n \n The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol....\n \n \n\n \n The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled.\n \n \"All right,\" said Strike, setting down his glass. \"What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you.\"\n \n Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. \"I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you....\"\n \n \"All I said to him....\"\n \n \"I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?\"\n \n \"Ivy?\"\n \n Cob looked away. \"I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well....\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job.\"\n \n Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. \"But dammit, man, I thought....\"\n \n \"The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but....\" He paused and sighed. \"Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well....\" He shrugged. \"Who wants a wife that ranks you?\"\n \n \"Never thought of that,\" mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked \"Canalopolis, Mars.\"\n \n And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Ivy Hendricks and what happens to her throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25334, "query_start_index": 25336, "query_end_index": 25412, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Lieutenant Ivy Hendricks is the daughter of Harlan Hendricks, a formerly respected engineer. He created the surge-circuit, an innovation in interstellar astrogation, and he was awarded a Legion of Merit. He designed three famous ships: the Artemis, the Andromeda, and the Aphrodite, the prototype. Despite being hailed as the latest and greatest in technology, all three ships either exploded or failed. \nAccording to Lieutenant Ivy Hendricks, their failures were due to the lack of education on board. She claimed that her father asked for the crew members to be trained in surge-circuit technology, so they could use it properly and correctly. That wish was not granted and after all three ships failed, his reputation and career were doomed. Admiral Gorman pulled the plug on his career and therefore became the target of all Lieutenant Hendricks\u2019 hate. \nWith a bone to pick, Lieutenant Hendricks, a knowledgeable engineer herself, comes aboard the Aphrodite to serve as her engineer and occasional pilot. She wants to prove to the world that her father\u2019s creation was genius and deserving of praise. \nAlthough they started off on the wrong foot, Lieutenant Hendricks and Strike, her commander, develop a friendship and appreciation for each other. They bond over their deep hatred of Admiral Gorman and the joy of piloting a ship. She soon proves herself to Strike, and he begins to trust her. Their relationship walks the fine line between friendship and romance. \nAs the Aphrodite is attempting to rescue the fallen dreadnaughts, Lieutenant Hendricks comes up with the solution. Due to her constant tinkering on the ship, she had fixed the surge-circuit rheostat and made it ready to use. Initially, no one trusts her, seeing as the last time it was used people died. But Strike\u2019s trust in her is strong and true, so he approves the use of the surge-circuit. Hendricks pilots the ship, but soon becomes too overheated and comes close to fainting. Strike takes over piloting and eventually activates the surge-circuit. It works and they are able to rescue the two ships, one of which had Admiral Gorman, her sworn enemy, onboard. \nLieutenant Hendricks receives a major promotion; she is now an engineer at the Bureau of Ships. She proved them wrong, and restored her father\u2019s legacy and good name. The story ends with their romance left in the air, but Hendricks has much to be proud of. \n"}
{"id": "63833_2", "pid": "63833_2_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJinx Ship To The Rescue\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus.\n \n Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor.\n \n The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship.\n \n \"It looks,\" he commented bitterly, \"like a pregnant carp.\"\n \n Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley\u2014\"Cob\" to his friends\u2014nodded in agreement. \"That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality.\" Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time.\n \n \"Tell me, Captain,\" continued Cob curiously, \"how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought....\"\n \n \"You know Gorman?\" queried Strykalski.\n \n Cob nodded. \"Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?\"\n \n \"The same.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, \"I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?\" He indicated the monitor expressively.\n \n Strike sighed. \"Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition.\n \n \"The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me.\n \n \"From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you.\n \n \"In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger....\"\n \n \"The Procyon A people?\" asked Cob.\n \n \"So you've heard about it.\" Strike shook his head sadly. \"My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists.\" He shrugged. \"Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this.\"\n \n Cob coughed slightly. \"I heard something about Ley City, too.\"\n \n \"Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely.\"\n \n Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. \"That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about....\"\n \n \"Canalopolis?\"\n \n Whitley nodded.\n \n \"That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball.\"\n \n \"I begin to see what you mean, Captain.\"\n \n \"Strike's the name, Cob.\"\n \n Whitley's smile was expansive. \"Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here.\" He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. \"She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either.\"\n \n Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . \"She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her.\"\n \n Cob shrugged philosophically. \"Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Venus-Mars.\"\n \n Cob scratched his chin speculatively. \"Perihelion run. Hot work.\"\n \n Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior.\n\"A surge-circuit monitor, so help me.\"\n \n Cob nodded agreement. \"The last of her class.\"\n \n \n\n \n And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives.\n \n Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine.\n \n All three were miserable failures.\n \n The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly.\n \n The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under\n20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull.\n \n The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did....\n \n The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve.\n \n Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere.\n \n Cob sensed his discomfort. \"That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too.\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable.\"\n \n Cob shrugged. \"Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women.\" He grinned maliciously. \"Equal rights, you know.\"\n \n \"No doubt,\" commented the other sourly. \"Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?\"\n \n Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent.\n \n Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?\" commented Cob.\n \n Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. \"But she's home to us, anyway.\"\n \n The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control.\n \n \"Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty....\"\n \n Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner.\n\"Orders, Captain?\"\n \n \"We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by\n600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. \"Captain,\" he asked, \"Who is the new E/O to be?\"\n \n Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. \"A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say.\"\n \n Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. \"I. V. Hendricks.\" He shook his head. \"Don't know him.\"\n \n \n\n \n The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure.\n \n Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others.\n \n \"... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important.\"\n \n \"That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard.\" He nodded. \"That's the story. Lift ship in....\" He glanced at his wrist chronograph, \"... in an hour and five.\"\n \n The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room.\n\"Captain?\"\n \n \"Come in, Cob.\" Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway.\n \n Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. \"Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?\"\n \n Strike looked blankly at the girl.\n \n \"Our new E/O, Captain,\" prompted Whitley.\n \n \"Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks,\" was all the Captain could find to say.\n \n The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. \"Thank you, Captain.\" Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. \"If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent.\"\n \n Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. \"Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so....\"\n \n The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, \"Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father.\"\n \n \n\n \n A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall.\n \n The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury....\n \n For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman.\n \n And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy.\n \n At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102\u00b0F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing.\n \n Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan.\n \n Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so.\n \n And she agreed.\n \n \n\n \n Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135\u00b0 and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food....\n \n And then it happened.\n \n Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship.\n \n A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end.\n \n Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face.\n \n \"Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!\"\n \n \"Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!\" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head.\n \n She read it through and looked up exultantly. \"This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!\"\n \n He returned her gaze sourly. \"For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself.\"\n \n Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. \"That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!\" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"That's very nice, Lieutenant,\" commented Cob drily. \"And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too.\"\n \n \"Let me understand you, Ivy,\" said Strike in a flat voice. \"What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat.\"\n \n There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. \"But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!\" Her expression turned to one of disgust. \"Or are you afraid?\"\n \n \"Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us.\"\n \n \"We can do it,\" said Ivy Hendricks simply.\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?\"\n \n Whitley shrugged. \"If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me.\"\n \n Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. \"We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty.\"\n \n Strike turned to the squawk-box. \"Evans!\"\n \n \"Evans here,\" came the reply.\n \n \"Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" Cob saluted and was gone.\n \n Strike returned to the squawk-box. \"Radar!\"\n \n \"Graham here,\" replied Celia from her station.\n \n \"Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain,\" the girl replied crisply.\n \n \"Gun deck!\"\n \n \"Gun deck here, sir,\" came a feminine voice.\n \n \"Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" The girl switched off.\n \n \"And now you, Miss Hendricks.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain?\" Her voice was low.\n \n \"Take over Control ... and Ivy....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Don't kill us off.\" He smiled down at her.\n \n She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward....\n \n \n\n \n Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying.\n \n Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport.\n \n The temperature stood at 140\u00b0 and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension.\n \n Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American \"bolas,\" the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together.\n \n \n They were diving into the sun.\n \n\n \n The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145\u00b0 and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison.\n \n Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel.\n \n \" Ivy! \" Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm.\n \n \"I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all.\"\n \n Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit.\n \n Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line.\n \n More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail.\n \n Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. \"Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat.\"\n \n \"We're trying, Cob!\" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. \" Now! \" He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain....\n \n The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. \"We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're....\" And that was all.\n \n The space-tug Scylla found them.\n \n The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol....\n \n \n\n \n The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled.\n \n \"All right,\" said Strike, setting down his glass. \"What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you.\"\n \n Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. \"I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you....\"\n \n \"All I said to him....\"\n \n \"I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?\"\n \n \"Ivy?\"\n \n Cob looked away. \"I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well....\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job.\"\n \n Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. \"But dammit, man, I thought....\"\n \n \"The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but....\" He paused and sighed. \"Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well....\" He shrugged. \"Who wants a wife that ranks you?\"\n \n \"Never thought of that,\" mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked \"Canalopolis, Mars.\"\n \n And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Ivy Hendricks and what happens to her throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25334, "query_start_index": 25336, "query_end_index": 25412, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "\nLieutenant Ivy Hendricks is the new Engineering Officer on Aphrodite. Strike and Cob assume that Ivy is a man before she arrives because they are sexist and because her name is listed as I.V. in the orders. Ivy is actually the daughter of the man who designed the award-winning craft.\n\nShe is cold and unfriendly towards Strike after she meets him, and that\u2019s probably because he makes a rude comment about the ship which her father created. After a couple weeks of working together, the two begin to get along very well. Strike admires Ivy\u2019s piloting skills and her depth of knowledge about the Aphrodite. \n\nThe two also bond over their shared hatred of Strike\u2019s former boss, Gorman. Strike feels as though he has ruined his career, and Ivy thinks that Gorman torpedoed her father\u2019s career. Ivy wants nothing more than to prove that Gorman is an idiot. \n\nHowever, when Gorman\u2019s ship is hurtling towards the sun and he and his crew members are about to die, Ivy sees that it\u2019s the perfect opportunity to show Gorman just how wrong he was about the ship her father designed. It\u2019s a very dangerous mission, but Ivy is steadfast in her decision and she\u2019s deeply courageous. She pilots the ship for most of the rescue mission, but eventually faints from the extreme heat. She tells Strike that he needs to take over, and he does a great job. \n\nIvy is then promoted, and she moves to Canalopolis, Mars. She now outranks her former Captain, Strike. \n"}
{"id": "63833_2", "pid": "63833_2_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJinx Ship To The Rescue\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus.\n \n Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor.\n \n The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship.\n \n \"It looks,\" he commented bitterly, \"like a pregnant carp.\"\n \n Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley\u2014\"Cob\" to his friends\u2014nodded in agreement. \"That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality.\" Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time.\n \n \"Tell me, Captain,\" continued Cob curiously, \"how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought....\"\n \n \"You know Gorman?\" queried Strykalski.\n \n Cob nodded. \"Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?\"\n \n \"The same.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, \"I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?\" He indicated the monitor expressively.\n \n Strike sighed. \"Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition.\n \n \"The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me.\n \n \"From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you.\n \n \"In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger....\"\n \n \"The Procyon A people?\" asked Cob.\n \n \"So you've heard about it.\" Strike shook his head sadly. \"My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists.\" He shrugged. \"Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this.\"\n \n Cob coughed slightly. \"I heard something about Ley City, too.\"\n \n \"Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely.\"\n \n Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. \"That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about....\"\n \n \"Canalopolis?\"\n \n Whitley nodded.\n \n \"That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball.\"\n \n \"I begin to see what you mean, Captain.\"\n \n \"Strike's the name, Cob.\"\n \n Whitley's smile was expansive. \"Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here.\" He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. \"She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either.\"\n \n Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . \"She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her.\"\n \n Cob shrugged philosophically. \"Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Venus-Mars.\"\n \n Cob scratched his chin speculatively. \"Perihelion run. Hot work.\"\n \n Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior.\n\"A surge-circuit monitor, so help me.\"\n \n Cob nodded agreement. \"The last of her class.\"\n \n \n\n \n And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives.\n \n Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine.\n \n All three were miserable failures.\n \n The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly.\n \n The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under\n20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull.\n \n The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did....\n \n The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve.\n \n Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere.\n \n Cob sensed his discomfort. \"That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too.\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable.\"\n \n Cob shrugged. \"Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women.\" He grinned maliciously. \"Equal rights, you know.\"\n \n \"No doubt,\" commented the other sourly. \"Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?\"\n \n Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent.\n \n Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?\" commented Cob.\n \n Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. \"But she's home to us, anyway.\"\n \n The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control.\n \n \"Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty....\"\n \n Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner.\n\"Orders, Captain?\"\n \n \"We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by\n600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. \"Captain,\" he asked, \"Who is the new E/O to be?\"\n \n Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. \"A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say.\"\n \n Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. \"I. V. Hendricks.\" He shook his head. \"Don't know him.\"\n \n \n\n \n The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure.\n \n Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others.\n \n \"... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important.\"\n \n \"That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard.\" He nodded. \"That's the story. Lift ship in....\" He glanced at his wrist chronograph, \"... in an hour and five.\"\n \n The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room.\n\"Captain?\"\n \n \"Come in, Cob.\" Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway.\n \n Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. \"Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?\"\n \n Strike looked blankly at the girl.\n \n \"Our new E/O, Captain,\" prompted Whitley.\n \n \"Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks,\" was all the Captain could find to say.\n \n The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. \"Thank you, Captain.\" Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. \"If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent.\"\n \n Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. \"Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so....\"\n \n The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, \"Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father.\"\n \n \n\n \n A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall.\n \n The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury....\n \n For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman.\n \n And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy.\n \n At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102\u00b0F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing.\n \n Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan.\n \n Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so.\n \n And she agreed.\n \n \n\n \n Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135\u00b0 and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food....\n \n And then it happened.\n \n Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship.\n \n A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end.\n \n Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face.\n \n \"Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!\"\n \n \"Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!\" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head.\n \n She read it through and looked up exultantly. \"This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!\"\n \n He returned her gaze sourly. \"For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself.\"\n \n Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. \"That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!\" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"That's very nice, Lieutenant,\" commented Cob drily. \"And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too.\"\n \n \"Let me understand you, Ivy,\" said Strike in a flat voice. \"What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat.\"\n \n There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. \"But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!\" Her expression turned to one of disgust. \"Or are you afraid?\"\n \n \"Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us.\"\n \n \"We can do it,\" said Ivy Hendricks simply.\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?\"\n \n Whitley shrugged. \"If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me.\"\n \n Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. \"We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty.\"\n \n Strike turned to the squawk-box. \"Evans!\"\n \n \"Evans here,\" came the reply.\n \n \"Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" Cob saluted and was gone.\n \n Strike returned to the squawk-box. \"Radar!\"\n \n \"Graham here,\" replied Celia from her station.\n \n \"Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain,\" the girl replied crisply.\n \n \"Gun deck!\"\n \n \"Gun deck here, sir,\" came a feminine voice.\n \n \"Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" The girl switched off.\n \n \"And now you, Miss Hendricks.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain?\" Her voice was low.\n \n \"Take over Control ... and Ivy....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Don't kill us off.\" He smiled down at her.\n \n She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward....\n \n \n\n \n Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying.\n \n Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport.\n \n The temperature stood at 140\u00b0 and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension.\n \n Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American \"bolas,\" the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together.\n \n \n They were diving into the sun.\n \n\n \n The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145\u00b0 and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison.\n \n Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel.\n \n \" Ivy! \" Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm.\n \n \"I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all.\"\n \n Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit.\n \n Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line.\n \n More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail.\n \n Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. \"Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat.\"\n \n \"We're trying, Cob!\" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. \" Now! \" He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain....\n \n The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. \"We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're....\" And that was all.\n \n The space-tug Scylla found them.\n \n The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol....\n \n \n\n \n The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled.\n \n \"All right,\" said Strike, setting down his glass. \"What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you.\"\n \n Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. \"I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you....\"\n \n \"All I said to him....\"\n \n \"I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?\"\n \n \"Ivy?\"\n \n Cob looked away. \"I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well....\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job.\"\n \n Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. \"But dammit, man, I thought....\"\n \n \"The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but....\" He paused and sighed. \"Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well....\" He shrugged. \"Who wants a wife that ranks you?\"\n \n \"Never thought of that,\" mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked \"Canalopolis, Mars.\"\n \n And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Ivy Hendricks and what happens to her throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25334, "query_start_index": 25336, "query_end_index": 25412, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ivy Hendricks is the engineering officer assigned to the Aphrodite. She is the daughter of Harlan Hendricks, the ship's original designer. She is fiercely protective of her father's legacy and resents Admiral Gorman for the way he treated him.\n\nHendricks and Strike, form an alliance of sorts after his initial surprise of seeing a woman assigned to this officer's role. When news arrives that two ships are in danger of falling into the sun, Ivy lobbies to use her father's technology to save the ship. Strike agrees to her plan although the risks are high. The Aphrodite eventually saves the ships although Ivy faints in the process from the heat and command has to be taken over by Strike.\n\nThe successful mission results in a promotion for Ivy as she works as a designer in the Bureau of Ships like her father."}
{"id": "63833_2", "pid": "63833_2_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nJinx Ship To The Rescue\n \n\n By ALFRED COPPEL, JR.\n \n \n Stand by for T.R.S. Aphrodite , butt of the Space Navy. She's got something terrific in her guts and only her ice-cold lady engineer can coax it out of her!\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1948. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n Brevet Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III of the Tellurian Wing, Combined Solarian Navies, stood ankle deep in the viscous mud of Venusport Base and surveyed his new command with a jaundiced eye. The hot, slimy, greenish rain that drenched Venusport for two-thirds of the 720-hour day had stopped at last, but now a miasmic fog was rising from the surrounding swampland, rolling across the mushy landing ramp toward the grounded spaceship. Visibility was dropping fast, and soon porto-sonar sets would have to be used to find the way about the surface Base. It was an ordinary day on Venus.\n \n Strike cursed Space Admiral Gorman and all his ancestors with a wealth of feeling. Then he motioned wearily to his companion, and together they sloshed through the mud toward the ancient monitor.\n \n The scaly bulk of the Tellurian Rocket Ship Aphrodite loomed unhappily into the thick air above the two men as they reached the ventral valve. Strike raised reluctant eyes to the sloping flank of the fat spaceship.\n \n \"It looks,\" he commented bitterly, \"like a pregnant carp.\"\n \n Senior Lieutenant Coburn Whitley\u2014\"Cob\" to his friends\u2014nodded in agreement. \"That's our Lover-Girl ... old Aphrodisiac herself. The ship with the poison personality.\" Cob was the Aphrodite's Executive, and he had been with her a full year ... which was a record for Execs on the Aphrodite . She generally sent them Earthside with nervous breakdowns in half that time.\n \n \"Tell me, Captain,\" continued Cob curiously, \"how does it happen that you of all people happened to draw this tub for a command? I thought....\"\n \n \"You know Gorman?\" queried Strykalski.\n \n Cob nodded. \"Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. Old Brass-bottom Gorman?\"\n \n \"The same.\"\n \n \"Well,\" Cob ran a hand over his chin speculatively, \"I know Gorman's a prize stinker ... but you were in command of the Ganymede . And, after all, you come from an old service family and all that. How come this?\" He indicated the monitor expressively.\n \n Strike sighed. \"Well, now, Cob, I'll tell you. You'll be spacing with me and I guess you've a right to know the worst ... not that you wouldn't find it out anyway. I come from a long line of very sharp operators. Seven generations of officers and gentlemen. Lousy with tradition.\n \n \"The first David Farragut Strykalski, son of a sea-loving Polish immigrant, emerged from World War II a four-striper and Congressional Medal winner. Then came David Farragut Strykalski, Jr., and, in the abortive Atomic War that terrified the world in 1961, he won a United Nations Peace Citation. And then came David Farragut Strykalski III ... me.\n \n \"From such humble beginnings do great traditions grow. But something happened when I came into the picture. I don't fit with the rest of them. Call it luck or temperament or what have you.\n \n \"In the first place I seem to have an uncanny talent for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Gorman for example. And I take too much on my own initiative. Gorman doesn't like that. I lost the Ganymede because I left my station where I was supposed to be running section-lines to take on a bunch of colonists I thought were in danger....\"\n \n \"The Procyon A people?\" asked Cob.\n \n \"So you've heard about it.\" Strike shook his head sadly. \"My tactical astrophysicist warned me that Procyon A might go nova. I left my routine post and loaded up on colonists.\" He shrugged. \"Wrong guess. No nova. I made an ass of myself and lost the Ganymede . Gorman gave it to his former aide. I got this.\"\n \n Cob coughed slightly. \"I heard something about Ley City, too.\"\n \n \"Me again. The Ganymede's whole crew ended up in the Luna Base brig. We celebrated a bit too freely.\"\n \n Cob Whitley looked admiringly at his new Commander. \"That was the night after the Ganymede broke the record for the Centaurus B-Earth run, wasn't it? And then wasn't there something about....\"\n \n \"Canalopolis?\"\n \n Whitley nodded.\n \n \"That time I called the Martian Ambassador a spy. It was at a Tellurian Embassy Ball.\"\n \n \"I begin to see what you mean, Captain.\"\n \n \"Strike's the name, Cob.\"\n \n Whitley's smile was expansive. \"Strike, I think you're going to like our old tin pot here.\" He patted the Aphrodite's nether belly affectionately. \"She's old ... but she's loose. And we're not likely to meet any Ambassadors or Admirals with her, either.\"\n \n Strykalski sighed, still thinking of his sleek Ganymede . \"She'll carry the mail, I suppose. And that's about all that's expected of her.\"\n \n Cob shrugged philosophically. \"Better than tanking that stinking rocket fuel, anyway. Deep space?\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Venus-Mars.\"\n \n Cob scratched his chin speculatively. \"Perihelion run. Hot work.\"\n \n Strike was again looking at the spaceship's unprepossessing exterior.\n\"A surge-circuit monitor, so help me.\"\n \n Cob nodded agreement. \"The last of her class.\"\n \n \n\n \n And she was not an inspiring sight. The fantastically misnamed Aphrodite was a surge-circuit monitor of twenty guns built some ten years back in the period immediately preceding the Ionian Subjugation Incident. She had been designed primarily for atomics, with a surge-circuit set-up for interstellar flight. At least that was the planner's view. In those days, interstellar astrogation was in its formative stage, and at the time of the Aphrodite's launching the surge-circuit was hailed as the very latest in space drives.\n \n Her designer, Harlan Hendricks, had been awarded a Legion of Merit for her, and every silver-braided admiral in the Fleet had dreamed of hoisting his flag on one of her class. There had been three. The Artemis , the Andromeda , and the prototype ... old Aphrodisiac. The three vessels had gone into action off Callisto after the Phobos Raid had set off hostilities between the Ionians and the Solarian Combine.\n \n All three were miserable failures.\n \n The eager officers commanding the three monitors had found the circuit too appealing to their hot little hands. They used it ... in some way, wrongly.\n \n The Artemis exploded. The Andromeda vanished in the general direction of Coma Berenices glowing white hot from the heat of a ruptured fission chamber and spewing gamma rays in all directions. And the Aphrodite's starboard tubes blew, causing her to spend her store of vicious energy spinning like a Fourth of July pinwheel under\n20 gravities until all her interior fittings ... including crew were a tangled, pulpy mess within her pressure hull.\n \n The Aphrodite was refitted for space. And because it was an integral part of her design, the circuit was rebuilt ... and sealed. She became a workhorse, growing more cantankerous with each passing year. She carried personnel.... She trucked ores. She ferried skeeterboats and tanked rocket fuel. Now, she would carry the mail. She would lift from Venusport and jet to Canalopolis, Mars, without delay or variation. Regulations, tradition and Admiral Gorman of the Inner Planet Fleet required it. And it was now up to David Farragut Strykalski III to see to it that she did....\n \n The Officer of the Deck, a trim blonde girl in spotless greys saluted smartly as Strike and Cob stepped through the valve.\n \n Strike felt vaguely uncomfortable. He knew, of course, that at least a third of the personnel on board non-combat vessels of the Inner Planet Fleet was female, but he had never actually had women on board a ship of his own, and he felt quite certain that he preferred them elsewhere.\n \n Cob sensed his discomfort. \"That was Celia Graham, Strike. Ensign. Radar Officer. She's good, too.\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"Don't like women in space. They make me uncomfortable.\"\n \n Cob shrugged. \"Celia's the only officer. But about a quarter of our ratings are women.\" He grinned maliciously. \"Equal rights, you know.\"\n \n \"No doubt,\" commented the other sourly. \"Is that why they named this ... ship 'Aphrodite'?\"\n \n Whitley saw fit to consider the question rhetorical and remained silent.\n \n Strike lowered his head to clear the arch of the flying-bridge bulkhead. Cob followed. He trailed his Captain through a jungle of chrome piping to the main control panels. Strike sank into an acceleration chair in front of the red DANGER seal on the surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"Looks like a drug-store fountain, doesn't it?\" commented Cob.\n \n Strykalski nodded sadly, thinking of the padded smoothness of the Ganymede's flying-bridge. \"But she's home to us, anyway.\"\n \n The thick Venusian fog had closed in around the top levels of the ship, hugging the ports and cutting off all view of the field outside. Strike reached for the squawk-box control.\n \n \"Now hear this. All officer personnel will assemble in the flying bridge at 600 hours for Captain's briefing. Officer of the Deck will recall any enlisted personnel now on liberty....\"\n \n Whitley was on his feet, all the slackness gone from his manner.\n\"Orders, Captain?\"\n \n \"We can't do anything until the new Engineering Officer gets here. They're sending someone down from the Antigone , and I expect him by\n600 hours. In the meantime you'll take over his part of the work. See to it that we are fueled and ready to lift ship by 602. Base will start loading the mail at 599:30. That's about all.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir.\" Whitley saluted and turned to go. At the bulkhead, he paused. \"Captain,\" he asked, \"Who is the new E/O to be?\"\n \n Strike stretched his long legs out on the steel deck. \"A Lieutenant Hendricks, I. V. Hendricks, is what the orders say.\"\n \n Cob thought hard for a moment and then shrugged his shoulders. \"I. V. Hendricks.\" He shook his head. \"Don't know him.\"\n \n \n\n \n The other officers of the T.R.S. Aphrodite were in conference with the Captain when Cob and the girl at his side reached the flying bridge. She was tall and dark-haired with regular features and pale blue eyes. She wore a service jumper with two silver stripes on the shoulder-straps, and even the shapeless garment could not hide the obvious trimness of her figure.\n \n Strike's back was toward the bulkhead, and he was addressing the others.\n \n \"... and that's about the story. We are to jet within 28,000,000 miles of Sol. Orbit is trans-Mercurian hyperbolic. With Mars in opposition, we have to make a perihelion run and it won't be pleasant. But I'm certain this old boiler can take it. I understand the old boy who designed her wasn't as incompetent as they say. But Space Regs are specific about mail runs. This is important to you, Evans. Your astrogation has to be accurate to within twenty-five miles plus or minus the shortest route. And there'll be no breaking orbit. Now be certain that the refrigeration units are checked, Mister Wilkins, especially in the hydroponic cells. Pure air is going to be important.\"\n \n \"That's about all there is to tell you. As soon as our rather leisurely E/O gets here, we can jet with Aunt Nelly's postcard.\" He nodded. \"That's the story. Lift ship in....\" He glanced at his wrist chronograph, \"... in an hour and five.\"\n \n The officers filed out and Cob Whitley stuck his head into the room.\n\"Captain?\"\n \n \"Come in, Cob.\" Strike's dark brows knit at the sight of the uniformed girl in the doorway.\n \n Cob's face was sober, but hidden amusement was kindling behind his eyes. \"Captain, may I present Lieutenant Hendricks? Lieutenant I-vy Hendricks?\"\n \n Strike looked blankly at the girl.\n \n \"Our new E/O, Captain,\" prompted Whitley.\n \n \"Uh ... welcome aboard, Miss Hendricks,\" was all the Captain could find to say.\n \n The girl's eyes were cold and unfriendly. \"Thank you, Captain.\" Her voice was like cracked ice tinkling in a glass. \"If I may have your permission to inspect the drives, Captain, I may be able to convince you that the designer of this vessel was not ... as you seem to think ... a senile incompetent.\"\n \n Strike was perplexed, and he showed it. \"Why, certainly ... uh ... Miss ... but why should you be so....\"\n \n The girl's voice was even colder than before as she said, \"Harlan Hendricks, Captain, is my father.\"\n \n \n\n \n A week in space had convinced Strike that he commanded a jinx ship. Jetting sunward from Venus, the cantankerous Aphrodite had burned a steering tube through, and it had been necessary to go into free-fall while Jenkins, the Assistant E/O, and a damage control party effected repairs. When the power was again applied, Old Aphrodisiac was running ten hours behind schedule, and Strike and Evans, the Astrogation Officer, were sweating out the unforeseen changes introduced into the orbital calculations by the time spent in free-fall.\n \n The Aphrodite rumbled on toward the orbit of Mercury....\n \n For all the tension between the occupants of the flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks worked well together. And after a second week in space, a reluctant admiration was replacing the resentment between them. Ivy spent whatever time she could spare tinkering with her father's pet surge-circuit and Strike began to realize that there was little she did not know about spaceship engineering. Then, too, Ivy spent a lot of time at the controls, and Strike was forced to admit that he had never seen a finer job of piloting done by man or woman.\n \n And finally, Ivy hated old Brass-bottom Gorman even more than Strike did. She felt that Gorman had ruined her father's career, and she was dedicating her life to proving her father right and Brass-bottom wrong. There's nothing in the cosmos to nurture friendship like a common enemy.\n \n At 30,000,000 miles from the sun, the Aphrodite's refrigeration units could no longer keep the interior of the ship at a comfortable temperature. The thermometer stood at 102\u00b0F, the very metal of the ship's fittings hot to the touch. Uniforms were discarded, insignia of rank vanished. The men dressed in fiberglass shorts and spaceboots, sweat making their naked bodies gleam like copper under the sodium-vapor lights. The women in the crew added only light blouses to their shorts ... and suffered from extra clothing.\n \n Strike was in the observation blister forward, when Ensign Graham called to say that she had picked up a radar contact sunward. The IFF showed the pips to be the Lachesis and the Atropos . The two dreadnaughts were engaged in coronary research patrol ... a purely routine business. But the thing that made Strike curse under his breath was Celia Graham's notation that the Atropos carried none other than Space Admiral Horatio Gorman, Cominch Inplan.\n \n Strike thought it a pity that old Brass-bottom couldn't fall into Hell's hottest pit ... and he told Ivy so.\n \n And she agreed.\n \n \n\n \n Old Aphrodisiac had reached perihelion when it happened. The thermometer stood at 135\u00b0 and tempers were snapping. Cob and Celia Graham had tangled about some minor point concerning Lover-Girl's weight and balance. Ivy went about her work on the bridge without speaking, and Strike made no attempt to brighten her sudden depression. Lieutenant Evans had punched Bayne, the Tactical Astrophysicist, in the eye for some disparaging remark about Southern California womanhood. The ratings were grumbling about the food....\n \n And then it happened.\n \n Cob was in the radio room when Sparks pulled the flimsy from the scrambler. It was a distress signal from the Lachesis . The Atropos had burst a fission chamber and was falling into the sun. Radiation made a transfer of personnel impossible, and the Atropos skeeterboats didn't have the power to pull away from the looming star. The Lachesis had a line on the sister dreadnaught and was valiantly trying to pull the heavy vessel to safety, but even the thundering power of the Lachesis' mighty drive wasn't enough to break Sol's deathgrip on the battleship.\n \n A fleet of souped-up space-tugs was on its way from Luna and Venusport, but they could not possibly arrive on time. And it was doubtful that even the tugs had the necessary power to drag the crippled Atropos away from a fiery end.\n \n Cob snatched the flimsy from Sparks' hands and galloped for the flying-bridge. He burst in and waved the message excitedly in front of Strykalski's face.\n \n \"Have a look at this! Ye gods and little catfish! Read it!\"\n \n \"Well, dammit, hold it still so I can!\" snapped Strike. He read the message and passed it to Ivy Hendricks with a shake of his head.\n \n She read it through and looked up exultantly. \"This is it ! This is the chance I've been praying for, Strike!\"\n \n He returned her gaze sourly. \"For Gorman to fall into the sun? I recall I said something of the sort myself, but there are other men on those ships. And, if I know Captain Varni on the Lachesis , he won't let go that line even if he fries himself.\"\n \n Ivy's eyes snapped angrily. \"That's not what I meant, and you know it! I mean this!\" She touched the red-sealed surge-circuit rheostat.\n \n \"That's very nice, Lieutenant,\" commented Cob drily. \"And I know that you've been very busy adjusting that gismo. But I seem to recall that the last time that circuit was uncorked everyone aboard became part of the woodwork ... very messily, too.\"\n \n \"Let me understand you, Ivy,\" said Strike in a flat voice. \"What you are suggesting is that I risk my ship and the lives of all of us trying to pull old Gorman's fat out of the fire with a drive that's blown skyhigh three times out of three. Very neat.\"\n \n There were tears bright in Ivy Hendricks' eyes and she sounded desperate. \"But we can save those ships! We can, I know we can! My father designed this ship! I know every rivet of her! Those idiots off Callisto didn't know what they were doing. These ships needed specially trained men. Father told them that! And I'm trained! I can take her in and save those ships!\" Her expression turned to one of disgust. \"Or are you afraid?\"\n \n \"Frankly, Ivy, I haven't enough sense to be afraid. But are you so certain that we can pull this off? If I make a mistake this time ... it'll be the last. For all of us.\"\n \n \"We can do it,\" said Ivy Hendricks simply.\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"What do you say, Cob? Shall we make it hotter in here?\"\n \n Whitley shrugged. \"If you say so, Strike. It's good enough for me.\"\n \n Celia Graham left the bridge shaking her head. \"We'll all be dead soon. And me so young and pretty.\"\n \n Strike turned to the squawk-box. \"Evans!\"\n \n \"Evans here,\" came the reply.\n \n \"Have Sparks get a DF fix on the Atropos and hold it. We'll home on their carrier wave. They're in trouble and we're going after them. Plot the course.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain.\"\n \n Strike turned to Cob. \"Have the gun-crews stand by to relieve the black-gang in the tube rooms. It's going to get hotter than the hinges of hell down there and we'll have to shorten shifts.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" Cob saluted and was gone.\n \n Strike returned to the squawk-box. \"Radar!\"\n \n \"Graham here,\" replied Celia from her station.\n \n \"Get a radar fix on the Lachesis and hold it. Send your dope up to Evans and tell him to send us a range estimate.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain,\" the girl replied crisply.\n \n \"Gun deck!\"\n \n \"Gun deck here, sir,\" came a feminine voice.\n \n \"Have number two starboard torpedo tube loaded with a fish and a spool of cable. Be ready to let fly on short notice ... any range.\"\n \n \"Yes, sir!\" The girl switched off.\n \n \"And now you, Miss Hendricks.\"\n \n \"Yes, Captain?\" Her voice was low.\n \n \"Take over Control ... and Ivy....\"\n \n \"Yes?\"\n \n \"Don't kill us off.\" He smiled down at her.\n \n She nodded silently and took her place at the control panel. Smoothly she turned old Aphrodisiac's nose sunward....\n \n \n\n \n Lashed together with a length of unbreakable beryllium steel cable, the Lachesis and the Atropos fell helplessly toward the sun. The frantic flame that lashed out from the Lachesis' tube was fading, her fission chambers fusing under the terrific heat of splitting atoms. Still she tried. She could not desert her sister ship, nor could she save her. Already the two ships had fallen to within 18,000,000 miles of the sun's terrifying atmosphere of glowing gases. The prominences that spouted spaceward seemed like great fiery tentacles reaching for the trapped men on board the warships. The atmospheric guiding fins, the gun-turrets and other protuberances on both ships were beginning to melt under the fierce radiance. Only the huge refrigeration plants on the vessels made life within them possible. And, even so, men were dying.\n \n Swiftly, the fat, ungainly shape of old Aphrodisiac drew near. In her flying-bridge, Strike and Ivy Hendricks watched the stricken ships in the darkened viewport.\n \n The temperature stood at 140\u00b0 and the air was bitter with the smell of hot metal. Ivy's blouse clung to her body, soaked through with perspiration. Sweat ran from her hair into her eyes and she gasped for breath in the oven hot compartment. Strike watched her with apprehension.\n \n Carefully, Ivy circled the two warships. From the starboard tube on the gun-deck, a homing rocket leapt toward the Atropos . It plunged straight and true, spilling cable as it flew. It slammed up against the hull, and stuck there, fast to the battleship's flank. Quickly, a robocrane drew it within the ship and the cable was made secure. Like cosmic replicas of the ancient South American \"bolas,\" the three spacecraft whirled in space ... and all three began that sunward plunge together.\n \n \n They were diving into the sun.\n \n\n \n The heat in the Aphrodite's bridge was unbearable. The thermometer showed 145\u00b0 and it seemed to Strike that Hell must be cool by comparison.\n \n Ivy fought her reeling senses and the bucking ship as the slack came out of the cable. Blackness was flickering at the edges of her field of vision. She could scarcely lift her hand to the red-sealed circuit rheostat. Shudderingly, she made the effort ... and failed. Conscious, but too spent to move, she collapsed over the blistering hot instrument panel.\n \n \" Ivy! \" Strike was beside her, cradling her head in his arm.\n \n \"I ... I ... can't make it ... Strike. You'll ... have to run ... the show ... after ... all.\"\n \n Strike laid her gently in an acceleration chair and turned toward the control panel. His head was throbbing painfully as he broke the seal on the surge-circuit.\n \n Slowly he turned the rheostat. Relays chattered. From deep within old Lover-Girl's vitals came a low whine. He fed more power into the circuit. Cadmium rods slipped into lead sheaths decks below in the tube-rooms. The whining rose in pitch. The spinning of the ships in space slowed. Stopped. With painful deliberation, they swung into line.\n \n More power. The whine changed to a shriek. A banshee wail.\n \n Cob's voice came through the squawk-box, soberly. \"Strike, Celia's fainted down here. We can't take much more of this heat.\"\n \n \"We're trying, Cob!\" shouted Strike over the whine of the circuit. The gauges showed the accumulators full. \" Now! \" He spun the rheostat to the stops, and black space burst over his brain....\n \n The last thing he remembered was a voice. It sounded like Bayne's. And it was shouting. \"We're moving 'em! We're pulling away! We're....\" And that was all.\n \n The space-tug Scylla found them.\n \n The three ships ... Atropos , Lachesis , and old Aphrodisiac ... lashed together and drifting in space. Every man and woman aboard out cold from the acceleration, and Aphrodite's tanks bone dry. But they were a safe 80,000,000 miles from Sol....\n \n \n\n \n The orchestra was subdued, the officer's club softly lighted. Cob leaned his elbow on the bar and bent to inspect the blue ribbon of the Spatial Cross on Strike's chest. Then he inspected his own and nodded with tipsy satisfaction. He stared out at the Martian night beyond the broad windows and back again at Strike. His frown was puzzled.\n \n \"All right,\" said Strike, setting down his glass. \"What's on your mind, Cob? Something's eating you.\"\n \n Whitley nodded very slowly. He took a long pull at his highball. \"I understand that you goofballed your chances of getting the Ganymede back when Gorman spoke his piece to you....\"\n \n \"All I said to him....\"\n \n \"I know. I know what you said ... and it won't bear repeating. But you're not fooling me. You've fallen for old Lover-Girl and you don't want to leave her. Ver-ry commendable. Loyal! Stout fellah! But what about Ivy?\"\n \n \"Ivy?\"\n \n Cob looked away. \"I thought that you and she ... well, I thought that when we got back ... well....\"\n \n Strike shook his head. \"She's gone to the Bureau of Ships with a designing job.\"\n \n Cob waved an expressive arm in the air. \"But dammit, man, I thought....\"\n \n \"The answer is no . Ivy's a nice girl ... but....\" He paused and sighed. \"Since she was promoted to her father's old rank ... well....\" He shrugged. \"Who wants a wife that ranks you?\"\n \n \"Never thought of that,\" mused Cob. For a long while he was silent; then he pulled out an address book and leafed through until he came to the pages marked \"Canalopolis, Mars.\"\n \n And he was gratified to see that Lieutenant Commander David Farragut Strykalski III was doing the same.\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Ivy Hendricks and what happens to her throughout the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 25334, "query_start_index": 25336, "query_end_index": 25412, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Ivy Hendricks is the new engineering officer on the Aphrodite, having been transferred from the Antigone. She is a tall woman with dark hair and contrasting pale blue eyes, who has a very wide range of experience in ship operations and engineering. Her father, Harlan Hendricks, was the man who designed the Aphrodite, so she knows the ship needs a lot of specific training. At first, the captain did not expect her to be a woman, and managed to imply that many people found her father incompetent. Although she seemed cold at first, as she reacted to the situation, she and the captain eventually got along fairly well, as he learned to appreciate her wide skill set that ranged from engineering to piloting. Ivy and Strike also had a common enemy in the higher ranks: Space Admiral Gorman. Once Spike trusted her he appreciated that Ivy spent a lot of spare time working on the old circuits, so she knew the ship like the back of her hand. When the Aphrodite found the Lachesis and the Atropos when following up on a distress signal, Ivy new the ship well enough to be able to formulate a plan to save everyone. She piloted the Aphrodite carefully, using cables shot with a rocket to connect the three ships together, but the spinning of the ships in the heat inside meant that she passed out and had to leave Strike to take over for her. Her plan was successful; she was promoted, and instead of returning to the Aphrodite she started a design job with the Bureau of Ships."}
{"id": "63862_5", "pid": "63862_5_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STALEMATE IN SPACE ***\n \n Stalemate In Space\n \n\n By CHARLES L. HARNESS\n \n \n Two mighty metal globes clung in a murderous death-struggle, lashing out with flames of poison. Yet deep in their twisted, radioactive wreckage the main battle raged\u2014where a girl swayed sensuously before her conqueror's mocking eyes.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n At first there was only the voice, a monotonous murmur in her ears.\n \n \" Die now\u2014die now\u2014die now \u2014\"\n \n Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it. For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly.\n \n \" Die now\u2014die now\u2014die now \u2014\"\n \n The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain her countrymen had either definitely won\u2014or lost.\n \n The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had expected nothing else.\n \n She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe, and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless grave of space.\n \n But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily over the memories of her past.\n \n For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched The Defender grow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian globe, The Invader , sprang out of black space to enslave the budding Terran Confederacy, The Defender was unfinished, half-equipped, and undermanned.\n \n The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.\n  The Defender , commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled itself from its orbit around Procyon and met The Invader with giant fission torpedoes.\n \n And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken Defender .\n \n The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the Scythians nine years to conquer The Defender's outer shell. Then had come that final interview with her father.\n \n \"In half an hour our last space port will be captured,\" he had telepathed curtly. \"Only one more messenger ship can leave The Defender . Be on it.\"\n \n \"No. I shall die here.\"\n \n His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. \"Then die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the battle.\"\n \n \"There's an off-chance you may survive,\" countered a mentor. \"We're also working on a means for your escape\u2014not only because you are Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with our secret if and when our experiments prove successful.\"\n \n \"But you must expect to die,\" her father had warned with gentle finality.\n \n She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched herself back to the present.\n \n That time had come.\n \n With some effort she worked herself out of the crumpled bed and lay on the floor of her little cubicle, panting and holding her chest with both hands. The metal floor was very cold. Evidently the enemy torpedo fissionables had finally broken through to the center portions of the ship, letting in the icy breath of space. Small matter. Not by freezing would she die.\n \n She reached out her hand, felt for the all-important key, and gasped in dismay. The mahogany box containing the key had burst its metal bonds and was lying on its side. The explosion that had crushed her cubicle had been terrific.\n \n With a gurgle of horror she snapped on her wrist luminar and examined the interior of the box.\n \n It was a shattered ruin.\n \n \n\n \n Once the fact was clear, she composed herself and lay there, breathing hard and thinking. She had no means to construct another key. At best, finding the rare tools and parts would take months, and during the interval the invaders would be cutting loose from the dead hulk that clutched their conquering battle globe in a metallic rigor mortis.\n \n She gave herself six weeks to accomplish this stalemate in space.\n \n Within that time she must know whether the prime movers were still intact, and whether she could safely enter the pile room herself, set the movers in motion, and draw the moderator columns. If it were unsafe, she must secure the unwitting assistance of her Scythian enemies.\n \n Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly. The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform. Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle to come would be her apparent harmlessness.\n \n Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector.\n \n The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question: Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot. Yes, he would shoot.\n \n Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously, hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first. He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards, he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on. Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.\n \n Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches, thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and the dull light in his brain went out.\n \n \n She fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\n \n\n \n Breathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man. For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of a woman.\n \n \n\n II\n \n The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him.\n \n \"Name?\"\n \n \"Evelyn Kane.\"\n \n The eyes of the inquisitor widened. \"So you admit to a Terran name. Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally, where is the corporal? Did you kill him?\"\n \n He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran class. No\u2014he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with this cool murderess.\n \n \"Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the corporal?\" He leaned impatiently over his desk.\n \n The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice.\n \n She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three.\n \n \"If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the guards out for a few minutes,\" she said, placing a hand on her hip. \"I have interesting information.\"\n \n So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one another.\n \n Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the recorder.\n \n \"Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector,\" she asked tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned.\n \n \"Perat, Viscount of Tharn,\" replied the man mechanically.\n \n \"What is the extent of his jurisdiction?\"\n \n \"From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles radius.\"\n \n \"Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant.\"\n \n The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a seal at its bottom.\n \n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n \n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n \n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor. She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n\"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n \n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n \n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n\"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of Zone One.\"\n \n When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully, and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for auditing.\n \n \n\n \n Evelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a similar ability in a mere clerk.\n \n Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of radiation-remover was everywhere.\n \n She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire.\n \n \"What is that?\" she asked the transport attendant.\n \n \"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n \n \"To the personnel office.\"\n \n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group\u2014two stories high, reasonably intact.\n \n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n \n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her.\n \n In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n \n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some sort, who was studying her visa.\n \n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria\u2014ah\u2014\"\u2014he looked at the visa suspiciously\u2014\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to S'ria Gerek, here\"\u2014he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back\u2014\"I wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to H.Q.?\"\n \n She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n \n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said simply. \"I was told that you , that is, I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate loudly into her mechanical transcriber.\n \n Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort, managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier working for\u2014working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n \n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet, you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"\u2014winking artfully\u2014\"and I'll see that\u2014\"\n \n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and anxiety. He appeared to listen.\n \n Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in the lowly employees that amused Gorph.\n \n Gorph looked at her uncertainly. \"Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns, sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony.\" He pointed to a hallway. \"All the way through there, across to the other wing.\"\n \n As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that the Faeg had ceased firing.\n \n \n\n \n Her heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he would let her dance for him.\n \n The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath for long. Perat was merely amused at her \"lie\" to his under-supervisor. He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false memories.\n \n She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n \n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings\u2014apparently identical\u2014on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel pleasures.\n \n In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe was there awaiting it.\n \n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n\"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n \n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n \n He had not as yet looked at her.\n \n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n \n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank\u2014was left standing. His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their eyes met, and he started imperceptibly.\n \n Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n \n Her father.\n \n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream. A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n \n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"\n \n Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n \n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n \n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the contrary if she could get him interested in her\u2014\n \n \"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there is the last living Terran within The Defender . It occurred to me that our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other nights\u2014\"\n \n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully, without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n \n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground, face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.\n \n The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n \n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n \n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her legs and walked toward him.\n \n He was studying her face very carefully.\n \n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she had to lean on the coping.\n \n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar completely.\n \n He dropped his hand. \"I'm sorry,\" he said with a quiet weariness. \"I shouldn't have asked you to kill the Terran. It was a sorry joke.\" Then: \"Have you ever seen me before?\"\n \n \"No,\" she whispered hoarsely. His mind was in hers, verifying the fact.\n \n \"Have you ever met my father, Phaen, the old Count of Tharn?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Do you have a son?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n His mind was out of hers again, and he had turned moodily back, surveying the courtyard and the dead. \"Gorph will be wondering what happened to you. Come to my quarters at the eighth metron tonight.\"\n \n Apparently he suspected nothing.\n  Father. Father. I had to do it. But we'll all join you, soon. Soon.\n \n\n\n III\n \n Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple terif and following the thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on tiptoe.\n \n For the last thirty \"nights\"\u2014the hours allotted to rest and sleep\u2014it had been thus. By \"day\" she probed furtively into the minds of the office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews. By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted out memory and knowledge.\n \n \"Enough for now,\" he ordered. \"Careful of your rib.\"\n \n When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed floor, and of falling.\n \n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n \n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.\n \n Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy were complete strangers. But the woman\u2014!\n \n \n \"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general resemblance to the Tharn line.\n \n \"But\u2014 can you deny that you are the woman ?\"\n \n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n \n \"There seemed to be some similarity\u2014\" she admitted. Her throat was suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know the woman.\n \n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling scowl.\n \n \"Similarity! Bah! That loop of hair over her right forehead hid a scar identical to yours. I have had the individual frames analyzed!\"\n \n Evelyn's hands knotted unconsciously. She forced her body to relax, but her mind was racing. This introduced another variable to be controlled in her plan for destruction. She must make it a known quantity.\n \n \"Did your father send it to you?\" she asked.\n \n \"The day before you arrived here. It had been en route for months, of course.\"\n \n \"What did he say about it?\"\n \n \"He said, 'Your widow and son send greetings. Be of good cheer, and accept our love.' What nonsense! He knows very well I'm not married and that\u2014well, if I have ever fathered any children, I don't know about them.\"\n \n \"Is that all he said?\"\n \n \"That's all, except that he included this ring.\" He pulled one of the duplicate jewels from his right middle finger and tossed it to her.\n\"It's identical to the one he had made for me when I entered on my majority. For a long time it was thought that it was the only stone of its kind on all the planets of the Tharn suns, a mineralogical freak, but I guess he found another. But why should I want two of them?\"\n \n Evelyn crossed the room and returned the ring.\n \n \"Existence is so full of mysteries, isn't it?\" murmured Perat.\n\"Sometimes it seems unfortunate that we must pass through a sentient phase on our way to death. This foolish, foolish war. Maybe the old count was right.\"\n \n \"You could be courtmartialed for that.\"\n \n \"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight\u2014an appeal from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and poured another glass of terif . \"Some fool inquisitor can't show proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n \n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n \n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who tries for a little extra profit.\"\n \n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n \n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in a languorous yawn.\n \n \"Very well.\" Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at her. \"On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and the others have gone.\"\n \n Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly.\n \n \"Perhaps you'd better come,\" insisted Perat.\n \n She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly, and then followed him out.\n \n This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually.\n \n \"Odd smell,\" commented Perat, wrinkling his nose.\n \n \"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained, provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n \n The question remained\u2014who would be the more frightened, she or the condemned inquisitor?\n \n She was perspiring freely, and the blonde hair on her arms and neck was standing stiffly when Perat opened the door for her and they entered the Zone Provost's chambers.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of duty explored in this story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28777, "query_start_index": 28779, "query_end_index": 28837, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Evelyn, the main character, is an example of a person following and respecting her duty. As a daughter of the commander she was brought up with a role model during the war time. Her father commanded the ship, defending the whole nation, and she witnessed it for years. It taught her to understand the duty and therefore she refused to leave the ship when she had the opportunity and accepted the important task of exploding both ships and herself as well. No matter how scared she was, she was determined to fulfill the duty placed on her by her father and mentors, and for that reason she pressed the button. When it didn't work, she kept feeling the burden of duty on her and started thinking of other means to destroy the enemies to fulfill the task. Following her duty moved her forward through pain and danger, made her find the ways to achieve it. When she shot her father, she did it because she had to, she knew it was the only right way to reach her aim instead of giving up to emotions. "}
{"id": "63862_5", "pid": "63862_5_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STALEMATE IN SPACE ***\n \n Stalemate In Space\n \n\n By CHARLES L. HARNESS\n \n \n Two mighty metal globes clung in a murderous death-struggle, lashing out with flames of poison. Yet deep in their twisted, radioactive wreckage the main battle raged\u2014where a girl swayed sensuously before her conqueror's mocking eyes.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n At first there was only the voice, a monotonous murmur in her ears.\n \n \" Die now\u2014die now\u2014die now \u2014\"\n \n Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it. For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly.\n \n \" Die now\u2014die now\u2014die now \u2014\"\n \n The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain her countrymen had either definitely won\u2014or lost.\n \n The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had expected nothing else.\n \n She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe, and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless grave of space.\n \n But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily over the memories of her past.\n \n For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched The Defender grow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian globe, The Invader , sprang out of black space to enslave the budding Terran Confederacy, The Defender was unfinished, half-equipped, and undermanned.\n \n The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.\n  The Defender , commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled itself from its orbit around Procyon and met The Invader with giant fission torpedoes.\n \n And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken Defender .\n \n The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the Scythians nine years to conquer The Defender's outer shell. Then had come that final interview with her father.\n \n \"In half an hour our last space port will be captured,\" he had telepathed curtly. \"Only one more messenger ship can leave The Defender . Be on it.\"\n \n \"No. I shall die here.\"\n \n His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. \"Then die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the battle.\"\n \n \"There's an off-chance you may survive,\" countered a mentor. \"We're also working on a means for your escape\u2014not only because you are Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with our secret if and when our experiments prove successful.\"\n \n \"But you must expect to die,\" her father had warned with gentle finality.\n \n She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched herself back to the present.\n \n That time had come.\n \n With some effort she worked herself out of the crumpled bed and lay on the floor of her little cubicle, panting and holding her chest with both hands. The metal floor was very cold. Evidently the enemy torpedo fissionables had finally broken through to the center portions of the ship, letting in the icy breath of space. Small matter. Not by freezing would she die.\n \n She reached out her hand, felt for the all-important key, and gasped in dismay. The mahogany box containing the key had burst its metal bonds and was lying on its side. The explosion that had crushed her cubicle had been terrific.\n \n With a gurgle of horror she snapped on her wrist luminar and examined the interior of the box.\n \n It was a shattered ruin.\n \n \n\n \n Once the fact was clear, she composed herself and lay there, breathing hard and thinking. She had no means to construct another key. At best, finding the rare tools and parts would take months, and during the interval the invaders would be cutting loose from the dead hulk that clutched their conquering battle globe in a metallic rigor mortis.\n \n She gave herself six weeks to accomplish this stalemate in space.\n \n Within that time she must know whether the prime movers were still intact, and whether she could safely enter the pile room herself, set the movers in motion, and draw the moderator columns. If it were unsafe, she must secure the unwitting assistance of her Scythian enemies.\n \n Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly. The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform. Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle to come would be her apparent harmlessness.\n \n Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector.\n \n The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question: Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot. Yes, he would shoot.\n \n Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously, hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first. He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards, he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on. Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.\n \n Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches, thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and the dull light in his brain went out.\n \n \n She fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\n \n\n \n Breathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man. For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of a woman.\n \n \n\n II\n \n The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him.\n \n \"Name?\"\n \n \"Evelyn Kane.\"\n \n The eyes of the inquisitor widened. \"So you admit to a Terran name. Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally, where is the corporal? Did you kill him?\"\n \n He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran class. No\u2014he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with this cool murderess.\n \n \"Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the corporal?\" He leaned impatiently over his desk.\n \n The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice.\n \n She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three.\n \n \"If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the guards out for a few minutes,\" she said, placing a hand on her hip. \"I have interesting information.\"\n \n So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one another.\n \n Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the recorder.\n \n \"Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector,\" she asked tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned.\n \n \"Perat, Viscount of Tharn,\" replied the man mechanically.\n \n \"What is the extent of his jurisdiction?\"\n \n \"From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles radius.\"\n \n \"Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant.\"\n \n The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a seal at its bottom.\n \n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n \n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n \n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor. She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n\"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n \n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n \n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n\"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of Zone One.\"\n \n When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully, and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for auditing.\n \n \n\n \n Evelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a similar ability in a mere clerk.\n \n Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of radiation-remover was everywhere.\n \n She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire.\n \n \"What is that?\" she asked the transport attendant.\n \n \"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n \n \"To the personnel office.\"\n \n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group\u2014two stories high, reasonably intact.\n \n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n \n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her.\n \n In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n \n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some sort, who was studying her visa.\n \n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria\u2014ah\u2014\"\u2014he looked at the visa suspiciously\u2014\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to S'ria Gerek, here\"\u2014he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back\u2014\"I wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to H.Q.?\"\n \n She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n \n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said simply. \"I was told that you , that is, I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate loudly into her mechanical transcriber.\n \n Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort, managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier working for\u2014working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n \n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet, you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"\u2014winking artfully\u2014\"and I'll see that\u2014\"\n \n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and anxiety. He appeared to listen.\n \n Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in the lowly employees that amused Gorph.\n \n Gorph looked at her uncertainly. \"Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns, sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony.\" He pointed to a hallway. \"All the way through there, across to the other wing.\"\n \n As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that the Faeg had ceased firing.\n \n \n\n \n Her heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he would let her dance for him.\n \n The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath for long. Perat was merely amused at her \"lie\" to his under-supervisor. He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false memories.\n \n She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n \n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings\u2014apparently identical\u2014on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel pleasures.\n \n In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe was there awaiting it.\n \n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n\"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n \n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n \n He had not as yet looked at her.\n \n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n \n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank\u2014was left standing. His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their eyes met, and he started imperceptibly.\n \n Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n \n Her father.\n \n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream. A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n \n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"\n \n Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n \n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n \n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the contrary if she could get him interested in her\u2014\n \n \"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there is the last living Terran within The Defender . It occurred to me that our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other nights\u2014\"\n \n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully, without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n \n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground, face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.\n \n The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n \n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n \n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her legs and walked toward him.\n \n He was studying her face very carefully.\n \n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she had to lean on the coping.\n \n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar completely.\n \n He dropped his hand. \"I'm sorry,\" he said with a quiet weariness. \"I shouldn't have asked you to kill the Terran. It was a sorry joke.\" Then: \"Have you ever seen me before?\"\n \n \"No,\" she whispered hoarsely. His mind was in hers, verifying the fact.\n \n \"Have you ever met my father, Phaen, the old Count of Tharn?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Do you have a son?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n His mind was out of hers again, and he had turned moodily back, surveying the courtyard and the dead. \"Gorph will be wondering what happened to you. Come to my quarters at the eighth metron tonight.\"\n \n Apparently he suspected nothing.\n  Father. Father. I had to do it. But we'll all join you, soon. Soon.\n \n\n\n III\n \n Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple terif and following the thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on tiptoe.\n \n For the last thirty \"nights\"\u2014the hours allotted to rest and sleep\u2014it had been thus. By \"day\" she probed furtively into the minds of the office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews. By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted out memory and knowledge.\n \n \"Enough for now,\" he ordered. \"Careful of your rib.\"\n \n When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed floor, and of falling.\n \n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n \n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.\n \n Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy were complete strangers. But the woman\u2014!\n \n \n \"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general resemblance to the Tharn line.\n \n \"But\u2014 can you deny that you are the woman ?\"\n \n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n \n \"There seemed to be some similarity\u2014\" she admitted. Her throat was suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know the woman.\n \n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling scowl.\n \n \"Similarity! Bah! That loop of hair over her right forehead hid a scar identical to yours. I have had the individual frames analyzed!\"\n \n Evelyn's hands knotted unconsciously. She forced her body to relax, but her mind was racing. This introduced another variable to be controlled in her plan for destruction. She must make it a known quantity.\n \n \"Did your father send it to you?\" she asked.\n \n \"The day before you arrived here. It had been en route for months, of course.\"\n \n \"What did he say about it?\"\n \n \"He said, 'Your widow and son send greetings. Be of good cheer, and accept our love.' What nonsense! He knows very well I'm not married and that\u2014well, if I have ever fathered any children, I don't know about them.\"\n \n \"Is that all he said?\"\n \n \"That's all, except that he included this ring.\" He pulled one of the duplicate jewels from his right middle finger and tossed it to her.\n\"It's identical to the one he had made for me when I entered on my majority. For a long time it was thought that it was the only stone of its kind on all the planets of the Tharn suns, a mineralogical freak, but I guess he found another. But why should I want two of them?\"\n \n Evelyn crossed the room and returned the ring.\n \n \"Existence is so full of mysteries, isn't it?\" murmured Perat.\n\"Sometimes it seems unfortunate that we must pass through a sentient phase on our way to death. This foolish, foolish war. Maybe the old count was right.\"\n \n \"You could be courtmartialed for that.\"\n \n \"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight\u2014an appeal from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and poured another glass of terif . \"Some fool inquisitor can't show proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n \n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n \n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who tries for a little extra profit.\"\n \n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n \n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in a languorous yawn.\n \n \"Very well.\" Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at her. \"On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and the others have gone.\"\n \n Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly.\n \n \"Perhaps you'd better come,\" insisted Perat.\n \n She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly, and then followed him out.\n \n This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually.\n \n \"Odd smell,\" commented Perat, wrinkling his nose.\n \n \"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained, provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n \n The question remained\u2014who would be the more frightened, she or the condemned inquisitor?\n \n She was perspiring freely, and the blonde hair on her arms and neck was standing stiffly when Perat opened the door for her and they entered the Zone Provost's chambers.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of duty explored in this story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28777, "query_start_index": 28779, "query_end_index": 28837, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Evelyn had an opportunity to save her life by joining the last messenger ship leaving The Defender as her father had originally instructed her to do. However, she does not want to abandon the fight because she possess a sense of duty towards the war and sticking by her father\u2019s side. She chooses to continue fighting with an understanding that it is inevitable that her side will lose the fight. She also accepts controlling a device that will destroy both globes and has a high chance of killing her in the process. She is willing to sacrifice her life to finish the job. The theme of duty is further explored when she is told to shoot her own father. She understands that if she saves her problem she would not be able to complete the detonation that she was assigned. Evelyn shoots her father as she concludes that she has to kill him to not alert anyone of her real identity. "}
{"id": "63862_5", "pid": "63862_5_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STALEMATE IN SPACE ***\n \n Stalemate In Space\n \n\n By CHARLES L. HARNESS\n \n \n Two mighty metal globes clung in a murderous death-struggle, lashing out with flames of poison. Yet deep in their twisted, radioactive wreckage the main battle raged\u2014where a girl swayed sensuously before her conqueror's mocking eyes.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n At first there was only the voice, a monotonous murmur in her ears.\n \n \" Die now\u2014die now\u2014die now \u2014\"\n \n Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it. For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly.\n \n \" Die now\u2014die now\u2014die now \u2014\"\n \n The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain her countrymen had either definitely won\u2014or lost.\n \n The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had expected nothing else.\n \n She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe, and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless grave of space.\n \n But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily over the memories of her past.\n \n For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched The Defender grow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian globe, The Invader , sprang out of black space to enslave the budding Terran Confederacy, The Defender was unfinished, half-equipped, and undermanned.\n \n The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.\n  The Defender , commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled itself from its orbit around Procyon and met The Invader with giant fission torpedoes.\n \n And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken Defender .\n \n The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the Scythians nine years to conquer The Defender's outer shell. Then had come that final interview with her father.\n \n \"In half an hour our last space port will be captured,\" he had telepathed curtly. \"Only one more messenger ship can leave The Defender . Be on it.\"\n \n \"No. I shall die here.\"\n \n His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. \"Then die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the battle.\"\n \n \"There's an off-chance you may survive,\" countered a mentor. \"We're also working on a means for your escape\u2014not only because you are Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with our secret if and when our experiments prove successful.\"\n \n \"But you must expect to die,\" her father had warned with gentle finality.\n \n She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched herself back to the present.\n \n That time had come.\n \n With some effort she worked herself out of the crumpled bed and lay on the floor of her little cubicle, panting and holding her chest with both hands. The metal floor was very cold. Evidently the enemy torpedo fissionables had finally broken through to the center portions of the ship, letting in the icy breath of space. Small matter. Not by freezing would she die.\n \n She reached out her hand, felt for the all-important key, and gasped in dismay. The mahogany box containing the key had burst its metal bonds and was lying on its side. The explosion that had crushed her cubicle had been terrific.\n \n With a gurgle of horror she snapped on her wrist luminar and examined the interior of the box.\n \n It was a shattered ruin.\n \n \n\n \n Once the fact was clear, she composed herself and lay there, breathing hard and thinking. She had no means to construct another key. At best, finding the rare tools and parts would take months, and during the interval the invaders would be cutting loose from the dead hulk that clutched their conquering battle globe in a metallic rigor mortis.\n \n She gave herself six weeks to accomplish this stalemate in space.\n \n Within that time she must know whether the prime movers were still intact, and whether she could safely enter the pile room herself, set the movers in motion, and draw the moderator columns. If it were unsafe, she must secure the unwitting assistance of her Scythian enemies.\n \n Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly. The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform. Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle to come would be her apparent harmlessness.\n \n Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector.\n \n The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question: Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot. Yes, he would shoot.\n \n Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously, hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first. He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards, he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on. Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.\n \n Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches, thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and the dull light in his brain went out.\n \n \n She fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\n \n\n \n Breathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man. For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of a woman.\n \n \n\n II\n \n The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him.\n \n \"Name?\"\n \n \"Evelyn Kane.\"\n \n The eyes of the inquisitor widened. \"So you admit to a Terran name. Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally, where is the corporal? Did you kill him?\"\n \n He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran class. No\u2014he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with this cool murderess.\n \n \"Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the corporal?\" He leaned impatiently over his desk.\n \n The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice.\n \n She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three.\n \n \"If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the guards out for a few minutes,\" she said, placing a hand on her hip. \"I have interesting information.\"\n \n So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one another.\n \n Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the recorder.\n \n \"Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector,\" she asked tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned.\n \n \"Perat, Viscount of Tharn,\" replied the man mechanically.\n \n \"What is the extent of his jurisdiction?\"\n \n \"From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles radius.\"\n \n \"Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant.\"\n \n The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a seal at its bottom.\n \n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n \n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n \n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor. She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n\"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n \n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n \n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n\"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of Zone One.\"\n \n When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully, and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for auditing.\n \n \n\n \n Evelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a similar ability in a mere clerk.\n \n Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of radiation-remover was everywhere.\n \n She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire.\n \n \"What is that?\" she asked the transport attendant.\n \n \"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n \n \"To the personnel office.\"\n \n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group\u2014two stories high, reasonably intact.\n \n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n \n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her.\n \n In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n \n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some sort, who was studying her visa.\n \n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria\u2014ah\u2014\"\u2014he looked at the visa suspiciously\u2014\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to S'ria Gerek, here\"\u2014he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back\u2014\"I wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to H.Q.?\"\n \n She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n \n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said simply. \"I was told that you , that is, I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate loudly into her mechanical transcriber.\n \n Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort, managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier working for\u2014working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n \n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet, you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"\u2014winking artfully\u2014\"and I'll see that\u2014\"\n \n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and anxiety. He appeared to listen.\n \n Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in the lowly employees that amused Gorph.\n \n Gorph looked at her uncertainly. \"Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns, sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony.\" He pointed to a hallway. \"All the way through there, across to the other wing.\"\n \n As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that the Faeg had ceased firing.\n \n \n\n \n Her heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he would let her dance for him.\n \n The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath for long. Perat was merely amused at her \"lie\" to his under-supervisor. He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false memories.\n \n She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n \n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings\u2014apparently identical\u2014on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel pleasures.\n \n In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe was there awaiting it.\n \n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n\"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n \n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n \n He had not as yet looked at her.\n \n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n \n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank\u2014was left standing. His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their eyes met, and he started imperceptibly.\n \n Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n \n Her father.\n \n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream. A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n \n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"\n \n Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n \n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n \n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the contrary if she could get him interested in her\u2014\n \n \"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there is the last living Terran within The Defender . It occurred to me that our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other nights\u2014\"\n \n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully, without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n \n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground, face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.\n \n The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n \n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n \n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her legs and walked toward him.\n \n He was studying her face very carefully.\n \n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she had to lean on the coping.\n \n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar completely.\n \n He dropped his hand. \"I'm sorry,\" he said with a quiet weariness. \"I shouldn't have asked you to kill the Terran. It was a sorry joke.\" Then: \"Have you ever seen me before?\"\n \n \"No,\" she whispered hoarsely. His mind was in hers, verifying the fact.\n \n \"Have you ever met my father, Phaen, the old Count of Tharn?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Do you have a son?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n His mind was out of hers again, and he had turned moodily back, surveying the courtyard and the dead. \"Gorph will be wondering what happened to you. Come to my quarters at the eighth metron tonight.\"\n \n Apparently he suspected nothing.\n  Father. Father. I had to do it. But we'll all join you, soon. Soon.\n \n\n\n III\n \n Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple terif and following the thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on tiptoe.\n \n For the last thirty \"nights\"\u2014the hours allotted to rest and sleep\u2014it had been thus. By \"day\" she probed furtively into the minds of the office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews. By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted out memory and knowledge.\n \n \"Enough for now,\" he ordered. \"Careful of your rib.\"\n \n When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed floor, and of falling.\n \n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n \n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.\n \n Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy were complete strangers. But the woman\u2014!\n \n \n \"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general resemblance to the Tharn line.\n \n \"But\u2014 can you deny that you are the woman ?\"\n \n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n \n \"There seemed to be some similarity\u2014\" she admitted. Her throat was suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know the woman.\n \n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling scowl.\n \n \"Similarity! Bah! That loop of hair over her right forehead hid a scar identical to yours. I have had the individual frames analyzed!\"\n \n Evelyn's hands knotted unconsciously. She forced her body to relax, but her mind was racing. This introduced another variable to be controlled in her plan for destruction. She must make it a known quantity.\n \n \"Did your father send it to you?\" she asked.\n \n \"The day before you arrived here. It had been en route for months, of course.\"\n \n \"What did he say about it?\"\n \n \"He said, 'Your widow and son send greetings. Be of good cheer, and accept our love.' What nonsense! He knows very well I'm not married and that\u2014well, if I have ever fathered any children, I don't know about them.\"\n \n \"Is that all he said?\"\n \n \"That's all, except that he included this ring.\" He pulled one of the duplicate jewels from his right middle finger and tossed it to her.\n\"It's identical to the one he had made for me when I entered on my majority. For a long time it was thought that it was the only stone of its kind on all the planets of the Tharn suns, a mineralogical freak, but I guess he found another. But why should I want two of them?\"\n \n Evelyn crossed the room and returned the ring.\n \n \"Existence is so full of mysteries, isn't it?\" murmured Perat.\n\"Sometimes it seems unfortunate that we must pass through a sentient phase on our way to death. This foolish, foolish war. Maybe the old count was right.\"\n \n \"You could be courtmartialed for that.\"\n \n \"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight\u2014an appeal from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and poured another glass of terif . \"Some fool inquisitor can't show proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n \n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n \n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who tries for a little extra profit.\"\n \n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n \n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in a languorous yawn.\n \n \"Very well.\" Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at her. \"On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and the others have gone.\"\n \n Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly.\n \n \"Perhaps you'd better come,\" insisted Perat.\n \n She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly, and then followed him out.\n \n This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually.\n \n \"Odd smell,\" commented Perat, wrinkling his nose.\n \n \"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained, provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n \n The question remained\u2014who would be the more frightened, she or the condemned inquisitor?\n \n She was perspiring freely, and the blonde hair on her arms and neck was standing stiffly when Perat opened the door for her and they entered the Zone Provost's chambers.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of duty explored in this story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28777, "query_start_index": 28779, "query_end_index": 28837, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Many of the characters in the story have their own duties that they take as a matter of life or death. Kane, Evelyn's father, is the Commander of The Defender and his duty is fighting for its people, even if it ultimately leads to his death. Evelyn has a similar duty, which is to destroy the planet, and thus both the Invaders and Defenders, and sacrifice her life in doing so. Evelyn is aware of this duty and does everything she can to see that it is done, which is why she decides to go undercover when she realizes that the destruct button has been broken. By following this duty, Evelyn does things she never imagined she would have to do, such as killing her father in order to maintain her cover."}
{"id": "63862_5", "pid": "63862_5_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\n*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STALEMATE IN SPACE ***\n \n Stalemate In Space\n \n\n By CHARLES L. HARNESS\n \n \n Two mighty metal globes clung in a murderous death-struggle, lashing out with flames of poison. Yet deep in their twisted, radioactive wreckage the main battle raged\u2014where a girl swayed sensuously before her conqueror's mocking eyes.\n \n [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]\n \n \n \n At first there was only the voice, a monotonous murmur in her ears.\n \n \" Die now\u2014die now\u2014die now \u2014\"\n \n Evelyn Kane awoke, breathing slowly and painfully. The top of the cubicle was bulging inward on her chest, and it seemed likely that a rib or two was broken. How long ago? Years? Minutes? She had no way of knowing. Her slender right hand found the oxygen valve and turned it. For a long while she lay, hurting and breathing helplessly.\n \n \" Die now\u2014die now\u2014die now \u2014\"\n \n The votron had awakened her with its heart-breaking code message, and it was her duty to carry out its command. Nine years after the great battle globes had crunched together the mentors had sealed her in this tiny cell, dormant, unwaking, to be livened only when it was certain her countrymen had either definitely won\u2014or lost.\n \n The votron's telepathic dirge chronicled the latter fact. She had expected nothing else.\n \n She had only to find the relay beside her cot, press the key that would set in motion gigantic prime movers in the heart of the great globe, and the conquerors would join the conquered in the wide and nameless grave of space.\n \n But life, now doled out by the second, was too delicious to abandon immediately. Her mind, like that of a drowning person, raced hungrily over the memories of her past.\n \n For twenty years, in company with her great father, she had watched The Defender grow from a vast metal skeleton into a planet-sized battle globe. But it had not grown fast enough, for when the Scythian globe, The Invader , sprang out of black space to enslave the budding Terran Confederacy, The Defender was unfinished, half-equipped, and undermanned.\n \n The Terrans could only fight for time and hope for a miracle.\n  The Defender , commanded by her father, Gordon, Lord Kane, hurled itself from its orbit around Procyon and met The Invader with giant fission torpedoes.\n \n And then, in an intergalactic proton storm beyond the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, the globes lost their bearings and collided. Hordes of brute-men poured through the crushed outer armor of the stricken Defender .\n \n The prone woman stirred uneasily. Here the images became unreal and terrible, with the recurrent vision of death. It had taken the Scythians nine years to conquer The Defender's outer shell. Then had come that final interview with her father.\n \n \"In half an hour our last space port will be captured,\" he had telepathed curtly. \"Only one more messenger ship can leave The Defender . Be on it.\"\n \n \"No. I shall die here.\"\n \n His fine tired eyes had studied her face in enigmatic appraisal. \"Then die usefully. The mentors are trying to develop a force that will destroy both globes in the moment of our inevitable defeat. If they are successful, you will have the task of pressing the final button of the battle.\"\n \n \"There's an off-chance you may survive,\" countered a mentor. \"We're also working on a means for your escape\u2014not only because you are Gordon's daughter, but because this great proton storm will prevent radio contact with Terra for years, and we want someone to escape with our secret if and when our experiments prove successful.\"\n \n \"But you must expect to die,\" her father had warned with gentle finality.\n \n She clenched her fingernails vehemently into her palms and wrenched herself back to the present.\n \n That time had come.\n \n With some effort she worked herself out of the crumpled bed and lay on the floor of her little cubicle, panting and holding her chest with both hands. The metal floor was very cold. Evidently the enemy torpedo fissionables had finally broken through to the center portions of the ship, letting in the icy breath of space. Small matter. Not by freezing would she die.\n \n She reached out her hand, felt for the all-important key, and gasped in dismay. The mahogany box containing the key had burst its metal bonds and was lying on its side. The explosion that had crushed her cubicle had been terrific.\n \n With a gurgle of horror she snapped on her wrist luminar and examined the interior of the box.\n \n It was a shattered ruin.\n \n \n\n \n Once the fact was clear, she composed herself and lay there, breathing hard and thinking. She had no means to construct another key. At best, finding the rare tools and parts would take months, and during the interval the invaders would be cutting loose from the dead hulk that clutched their conquering battle globe in a metallic rigor mortis.\n \n She gave herself six weeks to accomplish this stalemate in space.\n \n Within that time she must know whether the prime movers were still intact, and whether she could safely enter the pile room herself, set the movers in motion, and draw the moderator columns. If it were unsafe, she must secure the unwitting assistance of her Scythian enemies.\n \n Still prone, she found the first-aid kit and taped her chest expertly. The cold was beginning to make itself felt, so she flicked on the chaudiere she wore as an under-garment to her Scythian woman's uniform. Then she crawled on her elbows and stomach to the tiny door, spun the sealing gear, and was soon outside. Ignoring the pain and pulling on the side of the imitation rock that contained her cell, she got slowly to her feet. The air was thin indeed, and frigid. She turned the valve of her portable oxygen bottle almost subconsciously, while exploring the surrounding blackened forest as far as she could see. Mentally she was alert for roving alien minds. She had left her weapons inside the cubicle, except for the three things in the little leather bag dangling from her waist, for she knew that her greatest weapon in the struggle to come would be her apparent harmlessness.\n \n Four hundred yards behind her she detected the mind of a low-born Scythe, of the Tharn sun group. Very quickly she established it as that of a tired, brutish corporal, taking a mop-up squad through the black stumps and forlorn branches of the small forest that for years had supplied oxygen to the defenders of this sector.\n \n The corporal could not see her green Scythian uniform clearly, and evidently took her for a Terran woman. In his mind was the question: Should he shoot immediately, or should he capture her? It had been two months since he had seen a woman. But then, his orders were to shoot. Yes, he would shoot.\n \n Evelyn turned in profile to the beam-gun and stretched luxuriously, hoping that her grimace of pain could not be detected. With satisfaction, she sensed a sudden change of determination in the mind of the Tharn. The gun was lowered, and the man was circling to creep up behind her. He did not bother to notify his men. He wanted her first. He had seen her uniform, but that deterred him not a whit. Afterwards, he would call up the squad. Finally, they would kill her and move on. Women auxiliaries had no business here, anyway.\n \n Hips dipping, Evelyn sauntered into the shattered copse. The man moved faster, though still trying to approach quietly. Most of the radions in the mile-high ceiling had been destroyed, and the light was poor. He was not surprised when he lost track of his quarry. He tip-toed rapidly onward, picking his way through the charred and fallen branches, thinking that she must turn up again soon. He had not gone twenty yards in this manner when a howl of unbearable fury sounded in his mind, and the dull light in his brain went out.\n \n \n She fought for her life under that mile-high ceiling.\n \n\n \n Breathing deeply from her mental effort, the woman stepped from behind a great black tree trunk and hurried to the unconscious man. For I.Q.'s of 100 and less, telepathic cortical paralysis was quite effective. With cool efficiency and no trace of distaste she stripped the odorous uniform from the man, then took his weapon, turned the beam power down very low, and needled a neat slash across his throat. While he bled to death, she slipped deftly into the baggy suit, clasped the beam gun by the handle, and started up the sooty slope. For a time, at least, it would be safer to pass as a Tharn soldier than as any kind of a woman.\n \n \n\n II\n \n The inquisitor leaned forward, frowning at the girl before him.\n \n \"Name?\"\n \n \"Evelyn Kane.\"\n \n The eyes of the inquisitor widened. \"So you admit to a Terran name. Well, Terran, you are charged with having stolen passage on a supply lorry, and you also seem to be wearing the uniform of an infantry corporal as well as that of a Scythian woman auxiliary. Incidentally, where is the corporal? Did you kill him?\"\n \n He was prepared for a last-ditch denial. He would cut it short, have the guards remove her, and execution would follow immediately. In a way, it was unfortunate. The woman was obviously of a high Terran class. No\u2014he couldn't consider that. His slender means couldn't afford another woman in his quarters, and besides, he wouldn't feel safe with this cool murderess.\n \n \"Do you not understand the master tongue? Why did you kill the corporal?\" He leaned impatiently over his desk.\n \n The woman stared frankly back at him with her clear blue eyes. The guards on either side of her dug their nails into her arms, as was their custom with recalcitrant prisoners, but she took no notice.\n \n She had analyzed the minds of the three men. She could handle the inquisitor alone or the two guards alone, but not all three.\n \n \"If you aren't afraid of me, perhaps you'd be so kind as to send the guards out for a few minutes,\" she said, placing a hand on her hip. \"I have interesting information.\"\n \n So that was it. Buy her freedom by betraying fugitive Terrans. Well, he could take the information and then kill her. He nodded curtly to the guards, and they walked out of the hut, exchanging sly winks with one another.\n \n Evelyn Kane crossed her arms across her chest and felt her broken rib gingerly. The inquisitor stared up at her in sadistic admiration. He would certainly be on hand for the execution. His anticipation was cut short with a horrible realization. Under the paralyzing force of a mind greater than his own, he reached beneath the desk and switched off the recorder.\n \n \"Who is the Occupational Commandant for this Sector,\" she asked tersely. This must be done swiftly before the guards returned.\n \n \"Perat, Viscount of Tharn,\" replied the man mechanically.\n \n \"What is the extent of his jurisdiction?\"\n \n \"From the center of the Terran globe, outward four hundred miles radius.\"\n \n \"Good. Prepare for me the usual visa that a woman clerk needs for passage to the offices of the Occupational Commandant.\"\n \n The inquisitor filled in blanks in a stiff sheet of paper and stamped a seal at its bottom.\n \n \"You will add in the portion reserved for 'comments', the following:\n'Capable clerk. Others will follow as they are found available.'\"\n \n The man's pen scratched away obediently.\n \n Evelyn Kane smiled gently at the impotent, inwardly raging inquisitor. She took the paper, folded it, and placed it in a pocket in her blouse.\n\"Call the guards,\" she ordered.\n \n He pressed the button on his desk, and the guards re-entered.\n \n \"This person is no longer a prisoner,\" said the inquisitor woodenly.\n\"She is to take the next transport to the Occupational Commandant of Zone One.\"\n \n When the transport had left, neither inquisitor nor guards had any memory of the woman. However, in the due course of events, the recording was gathered up with many others like it, boxed carefully, and sent to the Office of the Occupational Commandant, Zone One, for auditing.\n \n \n\n \n Evelyn was extremely careful with her mental probe as she descended from the transport. The Occupational Commandant would undoubtedly be high-born and telepathic. He must not have occasion to suspect a similar ability in a mere clerk.\n \n Fighting had passed this way, too, and recently. Many of the buildings were still smoking, and many of the radions high above were either shot out or obscured by slowly drifting dust clouds. The acrid odor of radiation-remover was everywhere.\n \n She caught the sound of spasmodic small-arm fire.\n \n \"What is that?\" she asked the transport attendant.\n \n \"The Commandant is shooting prisoners,\" he replied laconically.\n \n \"Oh.\"\n \n \"Where did you want to go?\"\n \n \"To the personnel office.\"\n \n \"That way.\" He pointed to the largest building of the group\u2014two stories high, reasonably intact.\n \n She walked off down the gravel path, which was stained here and there with dark sticky red. She gave her visa to the guard at the door and was admitted to an improvised waiting room, where another guard eyed her stonily. The firing was much nearer. She recognized the obscene coughs of a Faeg pistol and began to feel sick.\n \n A woman in the green uniform of the Scythe auxiliary came in, whispered something to the guard, and then told Evelyn to follow her.\n \n In the anteroom a grey cat looked her over curiously, and Evelyn frowned. She might have to get rid of the cat if she stayed here. Under certain circumstances the animal could prove her deadliest enemy.\n \n The next room held a foppish little man, evidently a supervisor of some sort, who was studying her visa.\n \n \"I'm very happy to have you here, S'ria\u2014ah\u2014\"\u2014he looked at the visa suspiciously\u2014\"S'ria Lyn. Do sit down. But, as I was just remarking to S'ria Gerek, here\"\u2014he nodded to the other woman, who smiled back\u2014\"I wish the field officers would make up their august minds as to whether they want you or don't want you. Just why did they transfer you to H.Q.?\"\n \n She thought quickly. This pompous little ass would have to be given some answer that would keep him from checking with the inquisitor. It would have to be something personal. She looked at the false black in his eyebrows and sideburns, and the artificial way in which he had combed hair over his bald spot. She crossed her knees slowly, ignoring the narrowing eyes of S'ria Gerek, and smoothed the back of her braided yellow hair. He was studying her covertly.\n \n \"The men in the fighting zones are uncouth, S'ria Gorph,\" she said simply. \"I was told that you , that is, I mean\u2014\"\n \n \"Yes?\" he was the soul of graciousness. S'ria Gerek began to dictate loudly into her mechanical transcriber.\n \n Evelyn cleared her throat, averted her eyes, and with some effort, managed a delicate flush. \"I meant to say, I thought I would be happier working for\u2014working here. So I asked for a transfer.\"\n \n S'ria Gorph beamed. \"Splendid. But the occupation isn't over, yet, you know. There'll be hard work here for several weeks yet, before we cut loose from the enemy globe. But you do your work well\"\u2014winking artfully\u2014\"and I'll see that\u2014\"\n \n He stopped, and his face took on a hunted look of mingled fear and anxiety. He appeared to listen.\n \n Evelyn tensed her mind to receive and deceive a mental probe. She was certain now that the Zone Commandant was high-born and telepathic. The chances were only fifty-fifty that she could delude him for any length of time if he became interested in her. He must be avoided if at all possible. It should not be too difficult. He undoubtedly had a dozen personal secretaries and/or concubines and would take small interest in the lowly employees that amused Gorph.\n \n Gorph looked at her uncertainly. \"Perat, Viscount of the Tharn Suns, sends you his compliments and wishes to see you on the balcony.\" He pointed to a hallway. \"All the way through there, across to the other wing.\"\n \n As she left, she heard all sound in the room stop. The transcribing and calculating machines trailed off into a watchful silence, and she could feel the eyes of the men and women on her back. She noticed then that the Faeg had ceased firing.\n \n \n\n \n Her heart was beating faster as she walked down the hall. She felt a very strong probe flooding over her brain casually, palping with mild interest the artificial memories she supplied: Escapades with officers in the combat areas. Reprimands. Demotion and transfer. Her deception of Gorph. Her anticipation of meeting a real Viscount and hoping he would let her dance for him.\n \n The questing probe withdrew as idly as it had come, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She could not hope to deceive a suspicious telepath for long. Perat was merely amused at her \"lie\" to his under-supervisor. He had accepted her at her own face value, as supplied by her false memories.\n \n She opened the door to the balcony and saw a man leaning moodily on the balustrade. He gave no immediate notice of her presence.\n \n The five hundred and sixth heir of Tharn was of uncertain age, as were most of the men of both globes. Only the left side of his face could be seen. It was gaunt and leathery, and a deep thin scar lifted the corner of his mouth into a satanic smile. A faint paunch was gathering at his abdomen, as befitted a warrior turned to boring paper work. His closely cut black hair and the two sparkling red-gemmed rings\u2014apparently identical\u2014on his right hand seemed to denote a certain fastidiousness and unconscious superiority. To Evelyn the jeweled fingers bespoke an unnatural contrast to the past history of the man and were symptomatic of a personality that could find stimulation only in strange and cruel pleasures.\n \n In alarm she suddenly realized that she had inadvertently let her appraisal penetrate her uncovered conscious mind, and that this probe was there awaiting it.\n \n \"You are right,\" he said coldly, still staring into the court below.\n\"Now that the long battle is over, there is little left to divert me.\"\n \n He pushed the Faeg across the coping toward her. \"Take this.\"\n \n He had not as yet looked at her.\n \n She crossed the balcony, simultaneously grasping the pistol he offered her and looking down into the courtyard. There seemed to be nearly twenty Terrans lying about, in pools of their own blood.\n \n Only one man, a Terran officer of very high rank\u2014was left standing. His arms were folded somberly across his chest, and he studied the killer above him almost casually. But when the woman came out, their eyes met, and he started imperceptibly.\n \n Evelyn Kane felt a horrid chill creeping over her. The man's hair was white, now, and his proud face lined with deep furrows, but there could be no mistake. It was Gordon, Lord Kane.\n \n Her father.\n \n The sweat continued to grow on her forehead, and she felt for a moment that she needed only to wish hard enough, and this would be a dream. A dream of a big, kind, dark-haired man with laugh-wrinkles about his eyes, who sat her on his knee when she was a little girl and read bedtime stories to her from a great book with many pictures.\n \n An icy, amused voice came through: \"Our orders are to kill all prisoners. It is entertaining to shoot down helpless men, isn't it? It warms me to know that I am cruel and wanton, and worthy of my trust.\"\n \n Even in the midst of her horror, a cold, analytical part of her was explaining why the Commandant had called her to the balcony. Because all captured Terrans had to be killed, he hated his superiors, his own men, and especially the prisoners. A task so revolting he could not relegate to his own officers. He must do it himself, but he wanted his underlings to know he loathed them for it. She was merely a symbol of that contempt. His next words did not surprise her.\n \n \"It is even more stimulating to require a shuddering female to kill them. You are shuddering you know?\"\n \n She nodded dumbly. Her palm was so wet that a drop of sweat dropped from it to the floor. She was thinking hard. She could kill the Commandant and save her father for a little while. But then the problem of detonating the pile remained, and it would not be solved more quickly by killing the man who controlled the pile area. On the contrary if she could get him interested in her\u2014\n \n \"So far as our records indicate,\" murmured Perat, \"the man down there is the last living Terran within The Defender . It occurred to me that our newest clerk would like to start off her duties with a bang. The Faeg is adjusted to a needle-beam. If you put a bolt between the man's eyes, you may dance for me tonight, and perhaps there will be other nights\u2014\"\n \n The woman seemed lost in thought for a long time. Slowly, she lifted the ugly little weapon. The doomed Terran looked up at her peacefully, without expression. She lowered the Faeg, her arm trembling.\n \n Gordon, Lord Kane, frowned faintly, then closed his eyes. She raised the gun again, drew cross hairs with a nerveless wrist, and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud, hollow cough, but no recoil. The Terran officer, his eyes still closed and arms folded, sank to the ground, face up. Blood was running from a tiny hole in his forehead.\n \n The man leaning on the balustrade turned and looked at Evelyn, at first with amused contempt, then with narrowing, questioning eyes.\n \n \"Come here,\" he ordered.\n \n The Faeg dropped from her hand. With a titanic effort she activated her legs and walked toward him.\n \n He was studying her face very carefully.\n \n She felt that she was going to be sick. Her knees were so weak that she had to lean on the coping.\n \n With a forefinger he lifted up the mass of golden curls that hung over her right forehead and examined the scar hidden there, where the mentors had cut into her frontal lobe. The tiny doll they had created for her writhed uneasily in her waist-purse, but Perat seemed to be thinking of something else, and missed the significance of the scar completely.\n \n He dropped his hand. \"I'm sorry,\" he said with a quiet weariness. \"I shouldn't have asked you to kill the Terran. It was a sorry joke.\" Then: \"Have you ever seen me before?\"\n \n \"No,\" she whispered hoarsely. His mind was in hers, verifying the fact.\n \n \"Have you ever met my father, Phaen, the old Count of Tharn?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n \"Do you have a son?\"\n \n \"No.\"\n \n His mind was out of hers again, and he had turned moodily back, surveying the courtyard and the dead. \"Gorph will be wondering what happened to you. Come to my quarters at the eighth metron tonight.\"\n \n Apparently he suspected nothing.\n  Father. Father. I had to do it. But we'll all join you, soon. Soon.\n \n\n\n III\n \n Perat lay on his couch, sipping cold purple terif and following the thinly-clad dancer with narrowed eyes. Music, soft and subtle, floated from his communications box, illegally tuned to an officer's club somewhere. Evelyn made the rhythm part of her as she swayed slowly on tiptoe.\n \n For the last thirty \"nights\"\u2014the hours allotted to rest and sleep\u2014it had been thus. By \"day\" she probed furtively into the minds of the office staff, memorizing area designations, channels for official messages, and the names and authorizations of occupational field crews. By night she danced for Perat, who never took his eyes from her, nor his probe from her mind. While she danced it was not too difficult to elude the probe. There was an odd autohypnosis in dancing that blotted out memory and knowledge.\n \n \"Enough for now,\" he ordered. \"Careful of your rib.\"\n \n When he had first seen the bandages on her bare chest, that first night, she had been ready with a memory of dancing on a freshly waxed floor, and of falling.\n \n Perat seemed to be debating with himself as she sat down on her own couch to rest. He got up, unlocked his desk, and drew out a tiny reel of metal wire, which Evelyn recognized as being feed for an amateur stereop projector. He placed the reel in a projector that had been installed in the wall, flicked off the table luminar, and both of them waited in the dark, breathing rather loudly.\n \n Suddenly the center of the room was bright with a ball of light some two feet in diameter, and inside the luminous sphere were an old man, a woman, and a little boy of about four years. They were walking through a luxurious garden, and then they stopped, looked up, and waved gaily.\n \n Evelyn studied the trio with growing wonder. The old man and the boy were complete strangers. But the woman\u2014!\n \n \n \"That is Phaen, my father,\" said Perat quietly. \"He stayed at home because he hated war. And that is a path in our country estate on Tharn-R-VII. The little boy I fail to recognize, beyond a general resemblance to the Tharn line.\n \n \"But\u2014 can you deny that you are the woman ?\"\n \n The stereop snapped off, and she sat wordless in the dark.\n \n \"There seemed to be some similarity\u2014\" she admitted. Her throat was suddenly dry. Yet, why should she be alarmed? She really didn't know the woman.\n \n The table luminar was on now, and Perat was prowling hungrily about the room, his scar twisting his otherwise handsome face into a snarling scowl.\n \n \"Similarity! Bah! That loop of hair over her right forehead hid a scar identical to yours. I have had the individual frames analyzed!\"\n \n Evelyn's hands knotted unconsciously. She forced her body to relax, but her mind was racing. This introduced another variable to be controlled in her plan for destruction. She must make it a known quantity.\n \n \"Did your father send it to you?\" she asked.\n \n \"The day before you arrived here. It had been en route for months, of course.\"\n \n \"What did he say about it?\"\n \n \"He said, 'Your widow and son send greetings. Be of good cheer, and accept our love.' What nonsense! He knows very well I'm not married and that\u2014well, if I have ever fathered any children, I don't know about them.\"\n \n \"Is that all he said?\"\n \n \"That's all, except that he included this ring.\" He pulled one of the duplicate jewels from his right middle finger and tossed it to her.\n\"It's identical to the one he had made for me when I entered on my majority. For a long time it was thought that it was the only stone of its kind on all the planets of the Tharn suns, a mineralogical freak, but I guess he found another. But why should I want two of them?\"\n \n Evelyn crossed the room and returned the ring.\n \n \"Existence is so full of mysteries, isn't it?\" murmured Perat.\n\"Sometimes it seems unfortunate that we must pass through a sentient phase on our way to death. This foolish, foolish war. Maybe the old count was right.\"\n \n \"You could be courtmartialed for that.\"\n \n \"Speaking of courtmartials, I've got to attend one tonight\u2014an appeal from a death sentence.\" He arose, smoothed his hair and clothes, and poured another glass of terif . \"Some fool inquisitor can't show proper disposition of a woman prisoner.\"\n \n Evelyn's heart skipped a beat. \"Indeed?\"\n \n \"The wretch insists that he could remember if we would just let him alone. I suppose he took a bribe. You'll find one now and then who tries for a little extra profit.\"\n \n She must absolutely not be seen by the condemned inquisitor. The stimulus would almost certainly make him remember.\n \n \"I'll wait for you,\" she said indifferently, thrusting her arms out in a languorous yawn.\n \n \"Very well.\" Perat stepped to the door, then turned and looked back at her. \"On the other hand, I may need a clerk. It's way after hours, and the others have gone.\"\n \n Beneath a gesture of wry protest, she swallowed rapidly.\n \n \"Perhaps you'd better come,\" insisted Perat.\n \n She stood up, unloosed her waist-purse, checked its contents swiftly, and then followed him out.\n \n This might be a very close thing. From the purse she took a bottle of perfume and rubbed her ear lobes casually.\n \n \"Odd smell,\" commented Perat, wrinkling his nose.\n \n \"Odd scent,\" corrected Evelyn cryptically. She was thinking about the earnest faces of the mentors as they instructed her carefully in the use of the \"perfume.\" The adrenalin glands, they had explained, provided a useful and powerful stimulant to a man in danger. Adrenalin slowed the heart and digestion, increased the systole and blood pressure, and increased perspiration to cool the skin. But there could be too much of a good thing. An overdose of adrenalin, they had pointed out, caused almost immediate edema. The lungs filled rapidly with the serum and the victim ... drowned. The perfume she possessed over-stimulated, in some unknown way, the adrenals of frightened persons. It had no effect on inactive adrenals.\n \n The question remained\u2014who would be the more frightened, she or the condemned inquisitor?\n \n She was perspiring freely, and the blonde hair on her arms and neck was standing stiffly when Perat opened the door for her and they entered the Zone Provost's chambers.\n\nQuestion:\nHow is the theme of duty explored in this story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 28777, "query_start_index": 28779, "query_end_index": 28837, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The theme of duty is explored through Evelyn staying behind and refusing to board the last ship to leave The Defender. Duty is seen when she wakes up with broken rib, but still remembers her mission and tries to achieve it. Evelyn and her father both put duty before each other. When Evelyn was ordered to kill her father, she felt very bad and did not want to, but she had to do it. Her father did not express anything about knowing the person who will kill him. "}
{"id": "30029_4", "pid": "30029_4_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nLOST IN TRANSLATION\n \n\n By\n \n\n LARRY M. HARRIS\n \n In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en\u2014and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.\n \n An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.\n \n Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.\n \n He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.\n \n In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.\n \n True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.\n \n He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.\n \n But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.\n \n As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.\n \n The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.\n \n He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid\u2014that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.\n \n The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. \"You are Korvin,\" he said.\n \n It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. \"You are of the Tr'en,\" he replied. The green being nodded.\n \n \"I am Didyak of the Tr'en,\" he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly\u2014but no more than slightly\u2014and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.\n \n \"What do you want with me?\" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech\u2014apparently there was only one language on the planet\u2014was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.\n \n \"I want nothing with you,\" Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. \"You have other questions?\"\n \n Korvin sighed. \"What are you doing here, then?\" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.\n \n \"I am leaning against the door,\" Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.\n \n \"Why did you come to me?\" he said at last.\n \n Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. \"I have been ordered to come to you,\" Didyak said, \"by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you.\"\n \n It wasn't quite \"talk\"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: \"gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means.\" Korvin filed it away for future reference. \"Why did the Ruler not come to me?\" Korvin asked.\n \n \"The Ruler is the Ruler,\" Didyak said, slightly discomfited. \"You are to go to him. Such is his command.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. \"I obey the command of the Ruler,\" he said\u2014another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.\n \n But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en\u2014and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.\n \n That, after all, was his job.\n \n \n \n The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings\u2014a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair\u2014were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.\n \n The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.\n \n Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.\n \n The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex\u2014if any\u2014and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.\n \n Korvin was answering the last question. \"Some men are larger than I am,\" he said, \"and some are smaller.\"\n \n \"Within what limits?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Some are over eight feet tall,\" he said, \"and others under four feet.\" He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. \"Then there is a group of humans,\" he went on, \"who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that\u2014approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ,\" he volunteered helpfully.\n \n \"Approximately?\" the Ruler growled. \"We ask for precision here,\" he said. \"We are scientific men. We are exact.\"\n \n Korvin nodded hurriedly. \"Our race is more ... more approximate,\" he said apologetically.\n \n \"Slipshod,\" the Ruler muttered.\n \n \"Undoubtedly,\" Korvin agreed politely. \"I'll try to do the best I can for you.\"\n \n \"You will answer my questions,\" the Ruler said, \"with exactitude.\" He paused, frowning slightly. \"You landed your ship on this planet,\" he went on. \"Why?\"\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"A clumsy lie,\" the Ruler said. \"The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And it is your job to crash your ship?\" the Ruler said. \"Wasteful.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged again. \"What I say is true,\" he announced. \"Do you have tests for such matters?\"\n \n \"We do,\" the Ruler told him. \"We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you.\"\n \n Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector\u2014and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnop\u00e6dic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.\n \n Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.\n \n He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job\u2014not to mention the strongest personal inclinations\u2014demanded most strongly that he stay alive.\n \n He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.\n \n \"We shall test the machine,\" the Ruler said. \"In what room are you?\"\n \n \"In the Room of the Ruler,\" Korvin said equably.\n \n \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am sitting,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Are you a chulad ?\" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.\n \n \"I am not,\" he said.\n \n \n \n The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. \"You will tell an untruth now,\" he said. \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am standing,\" Korvin said.\n \n The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. \"The machine,\" he announced, \"has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue.\"\n \n Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.\n \n He hoped they were right.\n \n The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive.\n\"Why did you land your ship on this planet?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler nodded. \"Your job is to crash your ship,\" he said. \"It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?\"\n \n Korvin looked sober. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler blinked. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Was your job ended when the ship crashed?\" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant\n\"disposed of for all time.\"\n \n \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"What else does your job entail?\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. \"Staying alive.\"\n \n The Ruler roared. \"Do not waste time with the obvious!\" he shouted.\n\"Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly.\"\n \n \"I have told the truth,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But it is not\u2014not the truth we want,\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"I replied to your question,\" he said. \"I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?\"\n \n \"I\u2014\" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. \"You try to confuse the Ruler,\" he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. \"But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic\"\u2014the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying \u2014\"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called.\"\n \n Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.\n \n The Ruler looked down at Korvin. \"You will find that you cannot trick us,\" he said. \"You will find that such fiddling\"\u2014 chulad-like Korvin translated\u2014\"attempts will get you nowhere.\"\n \n Korvin devoutly hoped so.\n \n \n \n The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. \"They can be treated mathematically,\" one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. \"Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means.\"\n \n \"Good,\" Korvin said.\n \n The experts blinked. \"Good?\" he said.\n \n \"Naturally,\" Korvin said in a friendly tone.\n \n The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. \"Your plan is a failure,\" the expert said, \"and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. \"What is your plan?\" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.\n \n \"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically,\" Korvin said.\n \n The silence this time was even longer.\n \n \"The machine says that you tell the truth,\" the experts said at last, in a awed tone. \"Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us.\"\n \n Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.\n \n But it happened to be wrong.\n \n \n \n \"The name of your planet is Earth?\" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.\n \n \"Sometimes,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"It has other names?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It has no name,\" Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.\n \n \"Yet you call it Earth?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I do,\" Korvin said, \"for convenience.\"\n \n \"Do you know its location?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"Not with exactitude,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a stir. \"But you can find it again,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I can,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And you will tell us about it?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will,\" Korvin said, \"so far as I am able.\"\n \n \"We will wish to know about weapons,\" the Ruler said, \"and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?\"\n \n Korvin nearly smiled. \"Both,\" he said.\n \n A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. \"We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?\"\n \n Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. \"It is,\" he said.\n \n \"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It is,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Who is it that governs?\" the Ruler said.\n \n The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.\n \n \"The answer to that question,\" Korvin said, \"cannot be given to you.\"\n \n \"Any question of fact has an answer,\" the Ruler snapped. \"A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?\"\n \n \"Certainly,\" Korvin said. \"It is completely obvious and true.\"\n \n \"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said,\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then there is a governor for this system,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said again.\n \n The ruler sighed gently. \"Explain this governor to us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"The explanation cannot be given to you.\"\n \n The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. \"Is the deficiency in you?\" he said. \"Are you in some way unable to describe this government?\"\n \n \"It can be described,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will not,\" Korvin said.\n \n It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.\n \n The plan was taking hold.\n \n The Ruler had finished his conference. \"You are attempting again to confuse us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shook his head earnestly. \"I am attempting,\" he said, \"not to confuse you.\"\n \n \"Then I ask for an answer,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I request that I be allowed to ask a question,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. \"Ask it,\" he said. \"We shall answer it if we see fit to do so.\"\n \n Korvin tried to look grateful. \"Well, then,\" he said, \"what is your government?\"\n \n The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. \"Our government is the only logical form of government,\" he said in a high, sweet tenor. \"The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment.\"\n \n \"You have heard our government defined,\" the Ruler said. \"Now, you will define yours for us.\"\n \n Korvin shook his head. \"If you insist,\" he said, \"I'll try it. But you won't understand it.\"\n \n The Ruler frowned. \"We shall understand,\" he said. \"Begin. Who governs you?\"\n \n \"None,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But you are governed?\"\n \n Korvin nodded. \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then there is a governor,\" the Ruler insisted.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said. \"But everyone is the governor.\"\n \n \"Then there is no government,\" the Ruler said. \"There is no single decision.\"\n \n \"No,\" Korvin said equably, \"there are many decisions binding on all.\"\n \n \"Who makes them binding?\" the Ruler asked. \"Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?\"\n \n \"Many of them are unfavorable,\" Korvin said. \"But we are not forced to accept them.\"\n \n \"Do you act against your own interests?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Not knowingly,\" he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. \"I told you you wouldn't understand it,\" he said.\n \n \"It is a defect in your explanation,\" the Ruler almost snarled.\n \n \"My explanation is as exact as it can be,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler breathed gustily. \"Let us try something else,\" he said.\n\"Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples\u2014\"\n \n \"Neither have we,\" Korvin said. \"We are all individuals, like yourselves.\"\n \n \"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions\u2014\"\n \n \"We have no need of one,\" Korvin said calmly.\n \n \"Ah,\" the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. \"And why not?\"\n \n \"We call our form of government democracy ,\" Korvin said. \"It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler.\"\n \n One of the experts piped up suddenly. \"The beings themselves rule each other?\" he said. \"This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule.\"\n \n \"That is our form of government,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"You are lying,\" the expert said.\n \n One of the technicians chimed in: \"The machine tells us\u2014\"\n \n \"Then the machine is faulty,\" the expert said. \"It will be corrected.\"\n \n Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.\n \n It took three days\u2014but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.\n \n Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.\n \n On the third day Korvin escaped.\n \n It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.\n \n Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.\n \n Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.\n \n But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.\n \n The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby\u2014all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.\n \n He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.\n  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought\u2014nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course\u2014but try to make a Tr'en see it!\n \n  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own\u2014and that means no translation.\n \n  But\u2014damn it\u2014I wish I were home already.\n \n  I'm bored absolutely stiff!\n \n\n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Didyak and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 24742, "query_start_index": 24744, "query_end_index": 24802, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Didyak is a Tr'en from the planet Tr'en, and he is tall, slightly green, vaguely humanoid, and has cat-like pupils. Didyak is the first Tr'en that Korvin encounters after waking up in the days following his crash. Having been educated in the Tr'en language through hypnosis, Korvin is able to communicate with Didyak, and he does so, making sure to address with the utmost respect according to Tr'en customs. Didyak carries a small weapon that is translucent and looks like a pistol; he also carries a small knife attached to his belt. Didyak's speech is stiff and slightly awkward, much like the rest of the Tr'en, and he speaks with very careful attention paid to the construction of each sentence in order to express perfect logic. Like the other Tr'en, Didyak also has fifty-eight pointy teeth, at which Korvin tries not to stare. The Ruler has sent Didyak to bring Korvin for an audience with him so that he may learn more about Earth."}
{"id": "30029_4", "pid": "30029_4_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nLOST IN TRANSLATION\n \n\n By\n \n\n LARRY M. HARRIS\n \n In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en\u2014and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.\n \n An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.\n \n Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.\n \n He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.\n \n In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.\n \n True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.\n \n He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.\n \n But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.\n \n As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.\n \n The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.\n \n He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid\u2014that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.\n \n The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. \"You are Korvin,\" he said.\n \n It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. \"You are of the Tr'en,\" he replied. The green being nodded.\n \n \"I am Didyak of the Tr'en,\" he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly\u2014but no more than slightly\u2014and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.\n \n \"What do you want with me?\" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech\u2014apparently there was only one language on the planet\u2014was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.\n \n \"I want nothing with you,\" Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. \"You have other questions?\"\n \n Korvin sighed. \"What are you doing here, then?\" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.\n \n \"I am leaning against the door,\" Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.\n \n \"Why did you come to me?\" he said at last.\n \n Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. \"I have been ordered to come to you,\" Didyak said, \"by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you.\"\n \n It wasn't quite \"talk\"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: \"gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means.\" Korvin filed it away for future reference. \"Why did the Ruler not come to me?\" Korvin asked.\n \n \"The Ruler is the Ruler,\" Didyak said, slightly discomfited. \"You are to go to him. Such is his command.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. \"I obey the command of the Ruler,\" he said\u2014another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.\n \n But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en\u2014and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.\n \n That, after all, was his job.\n \n \n \n The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings\u2014a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair\u2014were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.\n \n The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.\n \n Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.\n \n The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex\u2014if any\u2014and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.\n \n Korvin was answering the last question. \"Some men are larger than I am,\" he said, \"and some are smaller.\"\n \n \"Within what limits?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Some are over eight feet tall,\" he said, \"and others under four feet.\" He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. \"Then there is a group of humans,\" he went on, \"who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that\u2014approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ,\" he volunteered helpfully.\n \n \"Approximately?\" the Ruler growled. \"We ask for precision here,\" he said. \"We are scientific men. We are exact.\"\n \n Korvin nodded hurriedly. \"Our race is more ... more approximate,\" he said apologetically.\n \n \"Slipshod,\" the Ruler muttered.\n \n \"Undoubtedly,\" Korvin agreed politely. \"I'll try to do the best I can for you.\"\n \n \"You will answer my questions,\" the Ruler said, \"with exactitude.\" He paused, frowning slightly. \"You landed your ship on this planet,\" he went on. \"Why?\"\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"A clumsy lie,\" the Ruler said. \"The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And it is your job to crash your ship?\" the Ruler said. \"Wasteful.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged again. \"What I say is true,\" he announced. \"Do you have tests for such matters?\"\n \n \"We do,\" the Ruler told him. \"We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you.\"\n \n Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector\u2014and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnop\u00e6dic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.\n \n Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.\n \n He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job\u2014not to mention the strongest personal inclinations\u2014demanded most strongly that he stay alive.\n \n He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.\n \n \"We shall test the machine,\" the Ruler said. \"In what room are you?\"\n \n \"In the Room of the Ruler,\" Korvin said equably.\n \n \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am sitting,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Are you a chulad ?\" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.\n \n \"I am not,\" he said.\n \n \n \n The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. \"You will tell an untruth now,\" he said. \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am standing,\" Korvin said.\n \n The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. \"The machine,\" he announced, \"has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue.\"\n \n Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.\n \n He hoped they were right.\n \n The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive.\n\"Why did you land your ship on this planet?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler nodded. \"Your job is to crash your ship,\" he said. \"It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?\"\n \n Korvin looked sober. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler blinked. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Was your job ended when the ship crashed?\" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant\n\"disposed of for all time.\"\n \n \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"What else does your job entail?\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. \"Staying alive.\"\n \n The Ruler roared. \"Do not waste time with the obvious!\" he shouted.\n\"Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly.\"\n \n \"I have told the truth,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But it is not\u2014not the truth we want,\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"I replied to your question,\" he said. \"I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?\"\n \n \"I\u2014\" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. \"You try to confuse the Ruler,\" he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. \"But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic\"\u2014the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying \u2014\"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called.\"\n \n Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.\n \n The Ruler looked down at Korvin. \"You will find that you cannot trick us,\" he said. \"You will find that such fiddling\"\u2014 chulad-like Korvin translated\u2014\"attempts will get you nowhere.\"\n \n Korvin devoutly hoped so.\n \n \n \n The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. \"They can be treated mathematically,\" one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. \"Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means.\"\n \n \"Good,\" Korvin said.\n \n The experts blinked. \"Good?\" he said.\n \n \"Naturally,\" Korvin said in a friendly tone.\n \n The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. \"Your plan is a failure,\" the expert said, \"and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. \"What is your plan?\" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.\n \n \"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically,\" Korvin said.\n \n The silence this time was even longer.\n \n \"The machine says that you tell the truth,\" the experts said at last, in a awed tone. \"Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us.\"\n \n Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.\n \n But it happened to be wrong.\n \n \n \n \"The name of your planet is Earth?\" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.\n \n \"Sometimes,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"It has other names?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It has no name,\" Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.\n \n \"Yet you call it Earth?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I do,\" Korvin said, \"for convenience.\"\n \n \"Do you know its location?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"Not with exactitude,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a stir. \"But you can find it again,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I can,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And you will tell us about it?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will,\" Korvin said, \"so far as I am able.\"\n \n \"We will wish to know about weapons,\" the Ruler said, \"and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?\"\n \n Korvin nearly smiled. \"Both,\" he said.\n \n A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. \"We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?\"\n \n Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. \"It is,\" he said.\n \n \"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It is,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Who is it that governs?\" the Ruler said.\n \n The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.\n \n \"The answer to that question,\" Korvin said, \"cannot be given to you.\"\n \n \"Any question of fact has an answer,\" the Ruler snapped. \"A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?\"\n \n \"Certainly,\" Korvin said. \"It is completely obvious and true.\"\n \n \"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said,\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then there is a governor for this system,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said again.\n \n The ruler sighed gently. \"Explain this governor to us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"The explanation cannot be given to you.\"\n \n The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. \"Is the deficiency in you?\" he said. \"Are you in some way unable to describe this government?\"\n \n \"It can be described,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will not,\" Korvin said.\n \n It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.\n \n The plan was taking hold.\n \n The Ruler had finished his conference. \"You are attempting again to confuse us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shook his head earnestly. \"I am attempting,\" he said, \"not to confuse you.\"\n \n \"Then I ask for an answer,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I request that I be allowed to ask a question,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. \"Ask it,\" he said. \"We shall answer it if we see fit to do so.\"\n \n Korvin tried to look grateful. \"Well, then,\" he said, \"what is your government?\"\n \n The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. \"Our government is the only logical form of government,\" he said in a high, sweet tenor. \"The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment.\"\n \n \"You have heard our government defined,\" the Ruler said. \"Now, you will define yours for us.\"\n \n Korvin shook his head. \"If you insist,\" he said, \"I'll try it. But you won't understand it.\"\n \n The Ruler frowned. \"We shall understand,\" he said. \"Begin. Who governs you?\"\n \n \"None,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But you are governed?\"\n \n Korvin nodded. \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then there is a governor,\" the Ruler insisted.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said. \"But everyone is the governor.\"\n \n \"Then there is no government,\" the Ruler said. \"There is no single decision.\"\n \n \"No,\" Korvin said equably, \"there are many decisions binding on all.\"\n \n \"Who makes them binding?\" the Ruler asked. \"Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?\"\n \n \"Many of them are unfavorable,\" Korvin said. \"But we are not forced to accept them.\"\n \n \"Do you act against your own interests?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Not knowingly,\" he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. \"I told you you wouldn't understand it,\" he said.\n \n \"It is a defect in your explanation,\" the Ruler almost snarled.\n \n \"My explanation is as exact as it can be,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler breathed gustily. \"Let us try something else,\" he said.\n\"Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples\u2014\"\n \n \"Neither have we,\" Korvin said. \"We are all individuals, like yourselves.\"\n \n \"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions\u2014\"\n \n \"We have no need of one,\" Korvin said calmly.\n \n \"Ah,\" the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. \"And why not?\"\n \n \"We call our form of government democracy ,\" Korvin said. \"It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler.\"\n \n One of the experts piped up suddenly. \"The beings themselves rule each other?\" he said. \"This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule.\"\n \n \"That is our form of government,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"You are lying,\" the expert said.\n \n One of the technicians chimed in: \"The machine tells us\u2014\"\n \n \"Then the machine is faulty,\" the expert said. \"It will be corrected.\"\n \n Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.\n \n It took three days\u2014but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.\n \n Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.\n \n On the third day Korvin escaped.\n \n It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.\n \n Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.\n \n Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.\n \n But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.\n \n The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby\u2014all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.\n \n He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.\n  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought\u2014nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course\u2014but try to make a Tr'en see it!\n \n  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own\u2014and that means no translation.\n \n  But\u2014damn it\u2014I wish I were home already.\n \n  I'm bored absolutely stiff!\n \n\n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Didyak and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 24742, "query_start_index": 24744, "query_end_index": 24802, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Didyak is the member of the Tr'en race who came to retrieve Korvin from his cell when The Ruler summoned Korvin for questioning. Didyak is the first Tr'en who Korvin had a conversation with after having learned the Tr'en language under drug hypnosis, which gave him practice in the customs of conversation and the logical, literal nature of the Tr'en discourse. Didyak is also the first experience the reader has with this language, and learns more about the knowledge Korvin comes into his mission with through this exchange."}
{"id": "30029_4", "pid": "30029_4_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nLOST IN TRANSLATION\n \n\n By\n \n\n LARRY M. HARRIS\n \n In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en\u2014and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.\n \n An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.\n \n Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.\n \n He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.\n \n In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.\n \n True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.\n \n He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.\n \n But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.\n \n As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.\n \n The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.\n \n He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid\u2014that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.\n \n The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. \"You are Korvin,\" he said.\n \n It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. \"You are of the Tr'en,\" he replied. The green being nodded.\n \n \"I am Didyak of the Tr'en,\" he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly\u2014but no more than slightly\u2014and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.\n \n \"What do you want with me?\" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech\u2014apparently there was only one language on the planet\u2014was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.\n \n \"I want nothing with you,\" Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. \"You have other questions?\"\n \n Korvin sighed. \"What are you doing here, then?\" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.\n \n \"I am leaning against the door,\" Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.\n \n \"Why did you come to me?\" he said at last.\n \n Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. \"I have been ordered to come to you,\" Didyak said, \"by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you.\"\n \n It wasn't quite \"talk\"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: \"gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means.\" Korvin filed it away for future reference. \"Why did the Ruler not come to me?\" Korvin asked.\n \n \"The Ruler is the Ruler,\" Didyak said, slightly discomfited. \"You are to go to him. Such is his command.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. \"I obey the command of the Ruler,\" he said\u2014another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.\n \n But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en\u2014and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.\n \n That, after all, was his job.\n \n \n \n The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings\u2014a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair\u2014were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.\n \n The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.\n \n Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.\n \n The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex\u2014if any\u2014and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.\n \n Korvin was answering the last question. \"Some men are larger than I am,\" he said, \"and some are smaller.\"\n \n \"Within what limits?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Some are over eight feet tall,\" he said, \"and others under four feet.\" He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. \"Then there is a group of humans,\" he went on, \"who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that\u2014approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ,\" he volunteered helpfully.\n \n \"Approximately?\" the Ruler growled. \"We ask for precision here,\" he said. \"We are scientific men. We are exact.\"\n \n Korvin nodded hurriedly. \"Our race is more ... more approximate,\" he said apologetically.\n \n \"Slipshod,\" the Ruler muttered.\n \n \"Undoubtedly,\" Korvin agreed politely. \"I'll try to do the best I can for you.\"\n \n \"You will answer my questions,\" the Ruler said, \"with exactitude.\" He paused, frowning slightly. \"You landed your ship on this planet,\" he went on. \"Why?\"\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"A clumsy lie,\" the Ruler said. \"The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And it is your job to crash your ship?\" the Ruler said. \"Wasteful.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged again. \"What I say is true,\" he announced. \"Do you have tests for such matters?\"\n \n \"We do,\" the Ruler told him. \"We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you.\"\n \n Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector\u2014and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnop\u00e6dic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.\n \n Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.\n \n He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job\u2014not to mention the strongest personal inclinations\u2014demanded most strongly that he stay alive.\n \n He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.\n \n \"We shall test the machine,\" the Ruler said. \"In what room are you?\"\n \n \"In the Room of the Ruler,\" Korvin said equably.\n \n \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am sitting,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Are you a chulad ?\" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.\n \n \"I am not,\" he said.\n \n \n \n The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. \"You will tell an untruth now,\" he said. \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am standing,\" Korvin said.\n \n The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. \"The machine,\" he announced, \"has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue.\"\n \n Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.\n \n He hoped they were right.\n \n The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive.\n\"Why did you land your ship on this planet?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler nodded. \"Your job is to crash your ship,\" he said. \"It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?\"\n \n Korvin looked sober. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler blinked. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Was your job ended when the ship crashed?\" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant\n\"disposed of for all time.\"\n \n \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"What else does your job entail?\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. \"Staying alive.\"\n \n The Ruler roared. \"Do not waste time with the obvious!\" he shouted.\n\"Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly.\"\n \n \"I have told the truth,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But it is not\u2014not the truth we want,\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"I replied to your question,\" he said. \"I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?\"\n \n \"I\u2014\" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. \"You try to confuse the Ruler,\" he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. \"But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic\"\u2014the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying \u2014\"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called.\"\n \n Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.\n \n The Ruler looked down at Korvin. \"You will find that you cannot trick us,\" he said. \"You will find that such fiddling\"\u2014 chulad-like Korvin translated\u2014\"attempts will get you nowhere.\"\n \n Korvin devoutly hoped so.\n \n \n \n The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. \"They can be treated mathematically,\" one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. \"Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means.\"\n \n \"Good,\" Korvin said.\n \n The experts blinked. \"Good?\" he said.\n \n \"Naturally,\" Korvin said in a friendly tone.\n \n The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. \"Your plan is a failure,\" the expert said, \"and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. \"What is your plan?\" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.\n \n \"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically,\" Korvin said.\n \n The silence this time was even longer.\n \n \"The machine says that you tell the truth,\" the experts said at last, in a awed tone. \"Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us.\"\n \n Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.\n \n But it happened to be wrong.\n \n \n \n \"The name of your planet is Earth?\" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.\n \n \"Sometimes,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"It has other names?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It has no name,\" Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.\n \n \"Yet you call it Earth?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I do,\" Korvin said, \"for convenience.\"\n \n \"Do you know its location?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"Not with exactitude,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a stir. \"But you can find it again,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I can,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And you will tell us about it?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will,\" Korvin said, \"so far as I am able.\"\n \n \"We will wish to know about weapons,\" the Ruler said, \"and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?\"\n \n Korvin nearly smiled. \"Both,\" he said.\n \n A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. \"We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?\"\n \n Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. \"It is,\" he said.\n \n \"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It is,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Who is it that governs?\" the Ruler said.\n \n The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.\n \n \"The answer to that question,\" Korvin said, \"cannot be given to you.\"\n \n \"Any question of fact has an answer,\" the Ruler snapped. \"A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?\"\n \n \"Certainly,\" Korvin said. \"It is completely obvious and true.\"\n \n \"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said,\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then there is a governor for this system,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said again.\n \n The ruler sighed gently. \"Explain this governor to us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"The explanation cannot be given to you.\"\n \n The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. \"Is the deficiency in you?\" he said. \"Are you in some way unable to describe this government?\"\n \n \"It can be described,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will not,\" Korvin said.\n \n It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.\n \n The plan was taking hold.\n \n The Ruler had finished his conference. \"You are attempting again to confuse us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shook his head earnestly. \"I am attempting,\" he said, \"not to confuse you.\"\n \n \"Then I ask for an answer,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I request that I be allowed to ask a question,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. \"Ask it,\" he said. \"We shall answer it if we see fit to do so.\"\n \n Korvin tried to look grateful. \"Well, then,\" he said, \"what is your government?\"\n \n The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. \"Our government is the only logical form of government,\" he said in a high, sweet tenor. \"The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment.\"\n \n \"You have heard our government defined,\" the Ruler said. \"Now, you will define yours for us.\"\n \n Korvin shook his head. \"If you insist,\" he said, \"I'll try it. But you won't understand it.\"\n \n The Ruler frowned. \"We shall understand,\" he said. \"Begin. Who governs you?\"\n \n \"None,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But you are governed?\"\n \n Korvin nodded. \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then there is a governor,\" the Ruler insisted.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said. \"But everyone is the governor.\"\n \n \"Then there is no government,\" the Ruler said. \"There is no single decision.\"\n \n \"No,\" Korvin said equably, \"there are many decisions binding on all.\"\n \n \"Who makes them binding?\" the Ruler asked. \"Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?\"\n \n \"Many of them are unfavorable,\" Korvin said. \"But we are not forced to accept them.\"\n \n \"Do you act against your own interests?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Not knowingly,\" he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. \"I told you you wouldn't understand it,\" he said.\n \n \"It is a defect in your explanation,\" the Ruler almost snarled.\n \n \"My explanation is as exact as it can be,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler breathed gustily. \"Let us try something else,\" he said.\n\"Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples\u2014\"\n \n \"Neither have we,\" Korvin said. \"We are all individuals, like yourselves.\"\n \n \"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions\u2014\"\n \n \"We have no need of one,\" Korvin said calmly.\n \n \"Ah,\" the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. \"And why not?\"\n \n \"We call our form of government democracy ,\" Korvin said. \"It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler.\"\n \n One of the experts piped up suddenly. \"The beings themselves rule each other?\" he said. \"This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule.\"\n \n \"That is our form of government,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"You are lying,\" the expert said.\n \n One of the technicians chimed in: \"The machine tells us\u2014\"\n \n \"Then the machine is faulty,\" the expert said. \"It will be corrected.\"\n \n Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.\n \n It took three days\u2014but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.\n \n Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.\n \n On the third day Korvin escaped.\n \n It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.\n \n Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.\n \n Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.\n \n But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.\n \n The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby\u2014all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.\n \n He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.\n  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought\u2014nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course\u2014but try to make a Tr'en see it!\n \n  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own\u2014and that means no translation.\n \n  But\u2014damn it\u2014I wish I were home already.\n \n  I'm bored absolutely stiff!\n \n\n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Didyak and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 24742, "query_start_index": 24744, "query_end_index": 24802, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Didyak is the Tr'en who arrives at Korvin's cell in order to take him to the Ruler. Didyak is the first being with which Korvin has had any interaction in a long time, so Korvin is happy to talk with Didyak and to work on using the correct Tr'en words to convey his exact meaning. Didyak answers Korvin's questions in a very literal sense, which is customary among the Tr'en people. Didyak explains that he must take Korvin to the Ruler and that the Ruler is going to question him in a way that is meant to gather information."}
{"id": "30029_4", "pid": "30029_4_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nLOST IN TRANSLATION\n \n\n By\n \n\n LARRY M. HARRIS\n \n In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en\u2014and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.\n \n An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.\n \n Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.\n \n He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.\n \n In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.\n \n True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.\n \n He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.\n \n But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.\n \n As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.\n \n The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.\n \n He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid\u2014that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.\n \n The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. \"You are Korvin,\" he said.\n \n It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. \"You are of the Tr'en,\" he replied. The green being nodded.\n \n \"I am Didyak of the Tr'en,\" he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly\u2014but no more than slightly\u2014and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.\n \n \"What do you want with me?\" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech\u2014apparently there was only one language on the planet\u2014was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.\n \n \"I want nothing with you,\" Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. \"You have other questions?\"\n \n Korvin sighed. \"What are you doing here, then?\" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.\n \n \"I am leaning against the door,\" Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.\n \n \"Why did you come to me?\" he said at last.\n \n Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. \"I have been ordered to come to you,\" Didyak said, \"by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you.\"\n \n It wasn't quite \"talk\"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: \"gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means.\" Korvin filed it away for future reference. \"Why did the Ruler not come to me?\" Korvin asked.\n \n \"The Ruler is the Ruler,\" Didyak said, slightly discomfited. \"You are to go to him. Such is his command.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. \"I obey the command of the Ruler,\" he said\u2014another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.\n \n But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en\u2014and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.\n \n That, after all, was his job.\n \n \n \n The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings\u2014a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair\u2014were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.\n \n The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.\n \n Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.\n \n The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex\u2014if any\u2014and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.\n \n Korvin was answering the last question. \"Some men are larger than I am,\" he said, \"and some are smaller.\"\n \n \"Within what limits?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Some are over eight feet tall,\" he said, \"and others under four feet.\" He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. \"Then there is a group of humans,\" he went on, \"who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that\u2014approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ,\" he volunteered helpfully.\n \n \"Approximately?\" the Ruler growled. \"We ask for precision here,\" he said. \"We are scientific men. We are exact.\"\n \n Korvin nodded hurriedly. \"Our race is more ... more approximate,\" he said apologetically.\n \n \"Slipshod,\" the Ruler muttered.\n \n \"Undoubtedly,\" Korvin agreed politely. \"I'll try to do the best I can for you.\"\n \n \"You will answer my questions,\" the Ruler said, \"with exactitude.\" He paused, frowning slightly. \"You landed your ship on this planet,\" he went on. \"Why?\"\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"A clumsy lie,\" the Ruler said. \"The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And it is your job to crash your ship?\" the Ruler said. \"Wasteful.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged again. \"What I say is true,\" he announced. \"Do you have tests for such matters?\"\n \n \"We do,\" the Ruler told him. \"We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you.\"\n \n Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector\u2014and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnop\u00e6dic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.\n \n Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.\n \n He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job\u2014not to mention the strongest personal inclinations\u2014demanded most strongly that he stay alive.\n \n He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.\n \n \"We shall test the machine,\" the Ruler said. \"In what room are you?\"\n \n \"In the Room of the Ruler,\" Korvin said equably.\n \n \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am sitting,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Are you a chulad ?\" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.\n \n \"I am not,\" he said.\n \n \n \n The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. \"You will tell an untruth now,\" he said. \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am standing,\" Korvin said.\n \n The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. \"The machine,\" he announced, \"has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue.\"\n \n Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.\n \n He hoped they were right.\n \n The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive.\n\"Why did you land your ship on this planet?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler nodded. \"Your job is to crash your ship,\" he said. \"It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?\"\n \n Korvin looked sober. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler blinked. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Was your job ended when the ship crashed?\" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant\n\"disposed of for all time.\"\n \n \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"What else does your job entail?\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. \"Staying alive.\"\n \n The Ruler roared. \"Do not waste time with the obvious!\" he shouted.\n\"Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly.\"\n \n \"I have told the truth,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But it is not\u2014not the truth we want,\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"I replied to your question,\" he said. \"I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?\"\n \n \"I\u2014\" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. \"You try to confuse the Ruler,\" he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. \"But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic\"\u2014the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying \u2014\"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called.\"\n \n Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.\n \n The Ruler looked down at Korvin. \"You will find that you cannot trick us,\" he said. \"You will find that such fiddling\"\u2014 chulad-like Korvin translated\u2014\"attempts will get you nowhere.\"\n \n Korvin devoutly hoped so.\n \n \n \n The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. \"They can be treated mathematically,\" one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. \"Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means.\"\n \n \"Good,\" Korvin said.\n \n The experts blinked. \"Good?\" he said.\n \n \"Naturally,\" Korvin said in a friendly tone.\n \n The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. \"Your plan is a failure,\" the expert said, \"and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. \"What is your plan?\" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.\n \n \"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically,\" Korvin said.\n \n The silence this time was even longer.\n \n \"The machine says that you tell the truth,\" the experts said at last, in a awed tone. \"Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us.\"\n \n Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.\n \n But it happened to be wrong.\n \n \n \n \"The name of your planet is Earth?\" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.\n \n \"Sometimes,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"It has other names?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It has no name,\" Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.\n \n \"Yet you call it Earth?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I do,\" Korvin said, \"for convenience.\"\n \n \"Do you know its location?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"Not with exactitude,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a stir. \"But you can find it again,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I can,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And you will tell us about it?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will,\" Korvin said, \"so far as I am able.\"\n \n \"We will wish to know about weapons,\" the Ruler said, \"and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?\"\n \n Korvin nearly smiled. \"Both,\" he said.\n \n A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. \"We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?\"\n \n Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. \"It is,\" he said.\n \n \"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It is,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Who is it that governs?\" the Ruler said.\n \n The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.\n \n \"The answer to that question,\" Korvin said, \"cannot be given to you.\"\n \n \"Any question of fact has an answer,\" the Ruler snapped. \"A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?\"\n \n \"Certainly,\" Korvin said. \"It is completely obvious and true.\"\n \n \"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said,\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then there is a governor for this system,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said again.\n \n The ruler sighed gently. \"Explain this governor to us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"The explanation cannot be given to you.\"\n \n The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. \"Is the deficiency in you?\" he said. \"Are you in some way unable to describe this government?\"\n \n \"It can be described,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will not,\" Korvin said.\n \n It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.\n \n The plan was taking hold.\n \n The Ruler had finished his conference. \"You are attempting again to confuse us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shook his head earnestly. \"I am attempting,\" he said, \"not to confuse you.\"\n \n \"Then I ask for an answer,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I request that I be allowed to ask a question,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. \"Ask it,\" he said. \"We shall answer it if we see fit to do so.\"\n \n Korvin tried to look grateful. \"Well, then,\" he said, \"what is your government?\"\n \n The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. \"Our government is the only logical form of government,\" he said in a high, sweet tenor. \"The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment.\"\n \n \"You have heard our government defined,\" the Ruler said. \"Now, you will define yours for us.\"\n \n Korvin shook his head. \"If you insist,\" he said, \"I'll try it. But you won't understand it.\"\n \n The Ruler frowned. \"We shall understand,\" he said. \"Begin. Who governs you?\"\n \n \"None,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But you are governed?\"\n \n Korvin nodded. \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then there is a governor,\" the Ruler insisted.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said. \"But everyone is the governor.\"\n \n \"Then there is no government,\" the Ruler said. \"There is no single decision.\"\n \n \"No,\" Korvin said equably, \"there are many decisions binding on all.\"\n \n \"Who makes them binding?\" the Ruler asked. \"Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?\"\n \n \"Many of them are unfavorable,\" Korvin said. \"But we are not forced to accept them.\"\n \n \"Do you act against your own interests?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Not knowingly,\" he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. \"I told you you wouldn't understand it,\" he said.\n \n \"It is a defect in your explanation,\" the Ruler almost snarled.\n \n \"My explanation is as exact as it can be,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler breathed gustily. \"Let us try something else,\" he said.\n\"Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples\u2014\"\n \n \"Neither have we,\" Korvin said. \"We are all individuals, like yourselves.\"\n \n \"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions\u2014\"\n \n \"We have no need of one,\" Korvin said calmly.\n \n \"Ah,\" the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. \"And why not?\"\n \n \"We call our form of government democracy ,\" Korvin said. \"It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler.\"\n \n One of the experts piped up suddenly. \"The beings themselves rule each other?\" he said. \"This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule.\"\n \n \"That is our form of government,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"You are lying,\" the expert said.\n \n One of the technicians chimed in: \"The machine tells us\u2014\"\n \n \"Then the machine is faulty,\" the expert said. \"It will be corrected.\"\n \n Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.\n \n It took three days\u2014but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.\n \n Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.\n \n On the third day Korvin escaped.\n \n It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.\n \n Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.\n \n Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.\n \n But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.\n \n The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby\u2014all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.\n \n He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.\n  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought\u2014nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course\u2014but try to make a Tr'en see it!\n \n  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own\u2014and that means no translation.\n \n  But\u2014damn it\u2014I wish I were home already.\n \n  I'm bored absolutely stiff!\n \n\n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWho is Didyak and what is his role in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 24742, "query_start_index": 24744, "query_end_index": 24802, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Didyak is a tall, green Tr\u2019en who, like all Tr\u2019en, looks somewhat humanoid. He comes to Korvin\u2019s cell after Korvin has been held in solitary confinement for three days. His initial conversation with Korvin follows the Tr\u2019en ritual in which Didyak says who Korvin is and Korvin says who Didyak is (\u201cof the Tr\u2019en\u201d). Didyak seems to be a guard because he has access to Korvin and enters his cell; he also carries a small translucent pistol-like weapon along with a knife in a sheath. After introducing each other, Didyak waits for Korvin to speak, and when he does, he asks what Didyak wants with him; Didyak answers that he wants nothing with Korvin. This response reminds Korvin of what he has learned of the Tr\u2019en; they are extremely literal, more inclined to mathematical and scientific thinking. And when Korvin asks what Didyak is doing there, he again answers literally, stating that he is leaning against the door. When Korvin finally asks a specific question that can only be answered literally, Didyak beams at him as if he is pleased that Korvin finally understands what he needs to say. Didyak tells him that he has been ordered to take Korvin to the Ruler, who wants to talk with him. Didyak escorts Korvin to the Ruler, but his interaction with Korvin has proven a stark reminder of how the Tr\u2019ens think and that Korvin needs to be mindful of how he speaks to them. The interaction with Didyak also gives Korvin his plan for how he will thwart the Tr\u2019ens\u2019 anticipated expansion to other planets.\n"}
{"id": "30029_3", "pid": "30029_3_0", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nLOST IN TRANSLATION\n \n\n By\n \n\n LARRY M. HARRIS\n \n In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en\u2014and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.\n \n An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.\n \n Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.\n \n He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.\n \n In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.\n \n True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.\n \n He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.\n \n But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.\n \n As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.\n \n The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.\n \n He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid\u2014that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.\n \n The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. \"You are Korvin,\" he said.\n \n It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. \"You are of the Tr'en,\" he replied. The green being nodded.\n \n \"I am Didyak of the Tr'en,\" he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly\u2014but no more than slightly\u2014and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.\n \n \"What do you want with me?\" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech\u2014apparently there was only one language on the planet\u2014was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.\n \n \"I want nothing with you,\" Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. \"You have other questions?\"\n \n Korvin sighed. \"What are you doing here, then?\" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.\n \n \"I am leaning against the door,\" Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.\n \n \"Why did you come to me?\" he said at last.\n \n Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. \"I have been ordered to come to you,\" Didyak said, \"by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you.\"\n \n It wasn't quite \"talk\"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: \"gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means.\" Korvin filed it away for future reference. \"Why did the Ruler not come to me?\" Korvin asked.\n \n \"The Ruler is the Ruler,\" Didyak said, slightly discomfited. \"You are to go to him. Such is his command.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. \"I obey the command of the Ruler,\" he said\u2014another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.\n \n But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en\u2014and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.\n \n That, after all, was his job.\n \n \n \n The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings\u2014a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair\u2014were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.\n \n The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.\n \n Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.\n \n The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex\u2014if any\u2014and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.\n \n Korvin was answering the last question. \"Some men are larger than I am,\" he said, \"and some are smaller.\"\n \n \"Within what limits?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Some are over eight feet tall,\" he said, \"and others under four feet.\" He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. \"Then there is a group of humans,\" he went on, \"who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that\u2014approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ,\" he volunteered helpfully.\n \n \"Approximately?\" the Ruler growled. \"We ask for precision here,\" he said. \"We are scientific men. We are exact.\"\n \n Korvin nodded hurriedly. \"Our race is more ... more approximate,\" he said apologetically.\n \n \"Slipshod,\" the Ruler muttered.\n \n \"Undoubtedly,\" Korvin agreed politely. \"I'll try to do the best I can for you.\"\n \n \"You will answer my questions,\" the Ruler said, \"with exactitude.\" He paused, frowning slightly. \"You landed your ship on this planet,\" he went on. \"Why?\"\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"A clumsy lie,\" the Ruler said. \"The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And it is your job to crash your ship?\" the Ruler said. \"Wasteful.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged again. \"What I say is true,\" he announced. \"Do you have tests for such matters?\"\n \n \"We do,\" the Ruler told him. \"We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you.\"\n \n Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector\u2014and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnop\u00e6dic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.\n \n Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.\n \n He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job\u2014not to mention the strongest personal inclinations\u2014demanded most strongly that he stay alive.\n \n He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.\n \n \"We shall test the machine,\" the Ruler said. \"In what room are you?\"\n \n \"In the Room of the Ruler,\" Korvin said equably.\n \n \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am sitting,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Are you a chulad ?\" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.\n \n \"I am not,\" he said.\n \n \n \n The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. \"You will tell an untruth now,\" he said. \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am standing,\" Korvin said.\n \n The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. \"The machine,\" he announced, \"has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue.\"\n \n Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.\n \n He hoped they were right.\n \n The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive.\n\"Why did you land your ship on this planet?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler nodded. \"Your job is to crash your ship,\" he said. \"It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?\"\n \n Korvin looked sober. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler blinked. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Was your job ended when the ship crashed?\" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant\n\"disposed of for all time.\"\n \n \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"What else does your job entail?\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. \"Staying alive.\"\n \n The Ruler roared. \"Do not waste time with the obvious!\" he shouted.\n\"Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly.\"\n \n \"I have told the truth,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But it is not\u2014not the truth we want,\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"I replied to your question,\" he said. \"I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?\"\n \n \"I\u2014\" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. \"You try to confuse the Ruler,\" he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. \"But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic\"\u2014the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying \u2014\"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called.\"\n \n Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.\n \n The Ruler looked down at Korvin. \"You will find that you cannot trick us,\" he said. \"You will find that such fiddling\"\u2014 chulad-like Korvin translated\u2014\"attempts will get you nowhere.\"\n \n Korvin devoutly hoped so.\n \n \n \n The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. \"They can be treated mathematically,\" one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. \"Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means.\"\n \n \"Good,\" Korvin said.\n \n The experts blinked. \"Good?\" he said.\n \n \"Naturally,\" Korvin said in a friendly tone.\n \n The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. \"Your plan is a failure,\" the expert said, \"and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. \"What is your plan?\" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.\n \n \"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically,\" Korvin said.\n \n The silence this time was even longer.\n \n \"The machine says that you tell the truth,\" the experts said at last, in a awed tone. \"Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us.\"\n \n Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.\n \n But it happened to be wrong.\n \n \n \n \"The name of your planet is Earth?\" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.\n \n \"Sometimes,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"It has other names?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It has no name,\" Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.\n \n \"Yet you call it Earth?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I do,\" Korvin said, \"for convenience.\"\n \n \"Do you know its location?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"Not with exactitude,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a stir. \"But you can find it again,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I can,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And you will tell us about it?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will,\" Korvin said, \"so far as I am able.\"\n \n \"We will wish to know about weapons,\" the Ruler said, \"and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?\"\n \n Korvin nearly smiled. \"Both,\" he said.\n \n A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. \"We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?\"\n \n Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. \"It is,\" he said.\n \n \"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It is,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Who is it that governs?\" the Ruler said.\n \n The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.\n \n \"The answer to that question,\" Korvin said, \"cannot be given to you.\"\n \n \"Any question of fact has an answer,\" the Ruler snapped. \"A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?\"\n \n \"Certainly,\" Korvin said. \"It is completely obvious and true.\"\n \n \"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said,\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then there is a governor for this system,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said again.\n \n The ruler sighed gently. \"Explain this governor to us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"The explanation cannot be given to you.\"\n \n The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. \"Is the deficiency in you?\" he said. \"Are you in some way unable to describe this government?\"\n \n \"It can be described,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will not,\" Korvin said.\n \n It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.\n \n The plan was taking hold.\n \n The Ruler had finished his conference. \"You are attempting again to confuse us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shook his head earnestly. \"I am attempting,\" he said, \"not to confuse you.\"\n \n \"Then I ask for an answer,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I request that I be allowed to ask a question,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. \"Ask it,\" he said. \"We shall answer it if we see fit to do so.\"\n \n Korvin tried to look grateful. \"Well, then,\" he said, \"what is your government?\"\n \n The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. \"Our government is the only logical form of government,\" he said in a high, sweet tenor. \"The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment.\"\n \n \"You have heard our government defined,\" the Ruler said. \"Now, you will define yours for us.\"\n \n Korvin shook his head. \"If you insist,\" he said, \"I'll try it. But you won't understand it.\"\n \n The Ruler frowned. \"We shall understand,\" he said. \"Begin. Who governs you?\"\n \n \"None,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But you are governed?\"\n \n Korvin nodded. \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then there is a governor,\" the Ruler insisted.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said. \"But everyone is the governor.\"\n \n \"Then there is no government,\" the Ruler said. \"There is no single decision.\"\n \n \"No,\" Korvin said equably, \"there are many decisions binding on all.\"\n \n \"Who makes them binding?\" the Ruler asked. \"Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?\"\n \n \"Many of them are unfavorable,\" Korvin said. \"But we are not forced to accept them.\"\n \n \"Do you act against your own interests?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Not knowingly,\" he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. \"I told you you wouldn't understand it,\" he said.\n \n \"It is a defect in your explanation,\" the Ruler almost snarled.\n \n \"My explanation is as exact as it can be,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler breathed gustily. \"Let us try something else,\" he said.\n\"Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples\u2014\"\n \n \"Neither have we,\" Korvin said. \"We are all individuals, like yourselves.\"\n \n \"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions\u2014\"\n \n \"We have no need of one,\" Korvin said calmly.\n \n \"Ah,\" the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. \"And why not?\"\n \n \"We call our form of government democracy ,\" Korvin said. \"It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler.\"\n \n One of the experts piped up suddenly. \"The beings themselves rule each other?\" he said. \"This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule.\"\n \n \"That is our form of government,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"You are lying,\" the expert said.\n \n One of the technicians chimed in: \"The machine tells us\u2014\"\n \n \"Then the machine is faulty,\" the expert said. \"It will be corrected.\"\n \n Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.\n \n It took three days\u2014but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.\n \n Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.\n \n On the third day Korvin escaped.\n \n It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.\n \n Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.\n \n Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.\n \n But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.\n \n The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby\u2014all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.\n \n He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.\n  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought\u2014nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course\u2014but try to make a Tr'en see it!\n \n  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own\u2014and that means no translation.\n \n  But\u2014damn it\u2014I wish I were home already.\n \n  I'm bored absolutely stiff!\n \n\n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of translation in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 24742, "query_start_index": 24744, "query_end_index": 24807, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "After Korvin crash-lands on Tr\u2019en, he is captured and imprisoned for several days before he wakes up. During that time, the prison guards teach him the Tr\u2019en language via hypnop\u00e6dic language instruction. He learns the language is closer to mathematical metalanguage and is centered in logic and clarity. As a result, Korvin has to adjust the way he speaks in order to make sure to convey what he really means in his conversations with Didyak and when he responds to The Ruler's line of questioning. Because the Tr'en language requires perfect logic, Korvin's answers to The Ruler's questions confuse The Ruler and his group of experts that examine the lie detector and confer to determine if Korvin is telling the truth or beating the system somehow. Translation ultimately saves Korvin since the Tr'en are unable to logically process the concept of democracy, and they will spend an endless amount of time trying to solve that problem instead of advancing to the point where they will maraud and settle others in the Comity of Planets."}
{"id": "30029_3", "pid": "30029_3_1", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nLOST IN TRANSLATION\n \n\n By\n \n\n LARRY M. HARRIS\n \n In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en\u2014and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.\n \n An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.\n \n Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.\n \n He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.\n \n In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.\n \n True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.\n \n He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.\n \n But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.\n \n As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.\n \n The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.\n \n He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid\u2014that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.\n \n The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. \"You are Korvin,\" he said.\n \n It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. \"You are of the Tr'en,\" he replied. The green being nodded.\n \n \"I am Didyak of the Tr'en,\" he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly\u2014but no more than slightly\u2014and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.\n \n \"What do you want with me?\" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech\u2014apparently there was only one language on the planet\u2014was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.\n \n \"I want nothing with you,\" Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. \"You have other questions?\"\n \n Korvin sighed. \"What are you doing here, then?\" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.\n \n \"I am leaning against the door,\" Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.\n \n \"Why did you come to me?\" he said at last.\n \n Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. \"I have been ordered to come to you,\" Didyak said, \"by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you.\"\n \n It wasn't quite \"talk\"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: \"gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means.\" Korvin filed it away for future reference. \"Why did the Ruler not come to me?\" Korvin asked.\n \n \"The Ruler is the Ruler,\" Didyak said, slightly discomfited. \"You are to go to him. Such is his command.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. \"I obey the command of the Ruler,\" he said\u2014another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.\n \n But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en\u2014and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.\n \n That, after all, was his job.\n \n \n \n The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings\u2014a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair\u2014were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.\n \n The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.\n \n Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.\n \n The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex\u2014if any\u2014and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.\n \n Korvin was answering the last question. \"Some men are larger than I am,\" he said, \"and some are smaller.\"\n \n \"Within what limits?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Some are over eight feet tall,\" he said, \"and others under four feet.\" He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. \"Then there is a group of humans,\" he went on, \"who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that\u2014approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ,\" he volunteered helpfully.\n \n \"Approximately?\" the Ruler growled. \"We ask for precision here,\" he said. \"We are scientific men. We are exact.\"\n \n Korvin nodded hurriedly. \"Our race is more ... more approximate,\" he said apologetically.\n \n \"Slipshod,\" the Ruler muttered.\n \n \"Undoubtedly,\" Korvin agreed politely. \"I'll try to do the best I can for you.\"\n \n \"You will answer my questions,\" the Ruler said, \"with exactitude.\" He paused, frowning slightly. \"You landed your ship on this planet,\" he went on. \"Why?\"\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"A clumsy lie,\" the Ruler said. \"The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And it is your job to crash your ship?\" the Ruler said. \"Wasteful.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged again. \"What I say is true,\" he announced. \"Do you have tests for such matters?\"\n \n \"We do,\" the Ruler told him. \"We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you.\"\n \n Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector\u2014and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnop\u00e6dic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.\n \n Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.\n \n He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job\u2014not to mention the strongest personal inclinations\u2014demanded most strongly that he stay alive.\n \n He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.\n \n \"We shall test the machine,\" the Ruler said. \"In what room are you?\"\n \n \"In the Room of the Ruler,\" Korvin said equably.\n \n \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am sitting,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Are you a chulad ?\" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.\n \n \"I am not,\" he said.\n \n \n \n The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. \"You will tell an untruth now,\" he said. \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am standing,\" Korvin said.\n \n The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. \"The machine,\" he announced, \"has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue.\"\n \n Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.\n \n He hoped they were right.\n \n The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive.\n\"Why did you land your ship on this planet?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler nodded. \"Your job is to crash your ship,\" he said. \"It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?\"\n \n Korvin looked sober. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler blinked. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Was your job ended when the ship crashed?\" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant\n\"disposed of for all time.\"\n \n \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"What else does your job entail?\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. \"Staying alive.\"\n \n The Ruler roared. \"Do not waste time with the obvious!\" he shouted.\n\"Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly.\"\n \n \"I have told the truth,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But it is not\u2014not the truth we want,\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"I replied to your question,\" he said. \"I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?\"\n \n \"I\u2014\" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. \"You try to confuse the Ruler,\" he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. \"But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic\"\u2014the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying \u2014\"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called.\"\n \n Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.\n \n The Ruler looked down at Korvin. \"You will find that you cannot trick us,\" he said. \"You will find that such fiddling\"\u2014 chulad-like Korvin translated\u2014\"attempts will get you nowhere.\"\n \n Korvin devoutly hoped so.\n \n \n \n The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. \"They can be treated mathematically,\" one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. \"Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means.\"\n \n \"Good,\" Korvin said.\n \n The experts blinked. \"Good?\" he said.\n \n \"Naturally,\" Korvin said in a friendly tone.\n \n The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. \"Your plan is a failure,\" the expert said, \"and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. \"What is your plan?\" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.\n \n \"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically,\" Korvin said.\n \n The silence this time was even longer.\n \n \"The machine says that you tell the truth,\" the experts said at last, in a awed tone. \"Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us.\"\n \n Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.\n \n But it happened to be wrong.\n \n \n \n \"The name of your planet is Earth?\" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.\n \n \"Sometimes,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"It has other names?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It has no name,\" Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.\n \n \"Yet you call it Earth?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I do,\" Korvin said, \"for convenience.\"\n \n \"Do you know its location?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"Not with exactitude,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a stir. \"But you can find it again,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I can,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And you will tell us about it?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will,\" Korvin said, \"so far as I am able.\"\n \n \"We will wish to know about weapons,\" the Ruler said, \"and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?\"\n \n Korvin nearly smiled. \"Both,\" he said.\n \n A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. \"We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?\"\n \n Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. \"It is,\" he said.\n \n \"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It is,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Who is it that governs?\" the Ruler said.\n \n The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.\n \n \"The answer to that question,\" Korvin said, \"cannot be given to you.\"\n \n \"Any question of fact has an answer,\" the Ruler snapped. \"A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?\"\n \n \"Certainly,\" Korvin said. \"It is completely obvious and true.\"\n \n \"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said,\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then there is a governor for this system,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said again.\n \n The ruler sighed gently. \"Explain this governor to us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"The explanation cannot be given to you.\"\n \n The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. \"Is the deficiency in you?\" he said. \"Are you in some way unable to describe this government?\"\n \n \"It can be described,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will not,\" Korvin said.\n \n It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.\n \n The plan was taking hold.\n \n The Ruler had finished his conference. \"You are attempting again to confuse us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shook his head earnestly. \"I am attempting,\" he said, \"not to confuse you.\"\n \n \"Then I ask for an answer,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I request that I be allowed to ask a question,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. \"Ask it,\" he said. \"We shall answer it if we see fit to do so.\"\n \n Korvin tried to look grateful. \"Well, then,\" he said, \"what is your government?\"\n \n The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. \"Our government is the only logical form of government,\" he said in a high, sweet tenor. \"The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment.\"\n \n \"You have heard our government defined,\" the Ruler said. \"Now, you will define yours for us.\"\n \n Korvin shook his head. \"If you insist,\" he said, \"I'll try it. But you won't understand it.\"\n \n The Ruler frowned. \"We shall understand,\" he said. \"Begin. Who governs you?\"\n \n \"None,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But you are governed?\"\n \n Korvin nodded. \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then there is a governor,\" the Ruler insisted.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said. \"But everyone is the governor.\"\n \n \"Then there is no government,\" the Ruler said. \"There is no single decision.\"\n \n \"No,\" Korvin said equably, \"there are many decisions binding on all.\"\n \n \"Who makes them binding?\" the Ruler asked. \"Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?\"\n \n \"Many of them are unfavorable,\" Korvin said. \"But we are not forced to accept them.\"\n \n \"Do you act against your own interests?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Not knowingly,\" he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. \"I told you you wouldn't understand it,\" he said.\n \n \"It is a defect in your explanation,\" the Ruler almost snarled.\n \n \"My explanation is as exact as it can be,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler breathed gustily. \"Let us try something else,\" he said.\n\"Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples\u2014\"\n \n \"Neither have we,\" Korvin said. \"We are all individuals, like yourselves.\"\n \n \"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions\u2014\"\n \n \"We have no need of one,\" Korvin said calmly.\n \n \"Ah,\" the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. \"And why not?\"\n \n \"We call our form of government democracy ,\" Korvin said. \"It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler.\"\n \n One of the experts piped up suddenly. \"The beings themselves rule each other?\" he said. \"This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule.\"\n \n \"That is our form of government,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"You are lying,\" the expert said.\n \n One of the technicians chimed in: \"The machine tells us\u2014\"\n \n \"Then the machine is faulty,\" the expert said. \"It will be corrected.\"\n \n Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.\n \n It took three days\u2014but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.\n \n Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.\n \n On the third day Korvin escaped.\n \n It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.\n \n Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.\n \n Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.\n \n But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.\n \n The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby\u2014all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.\n \n He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.\n  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought\u2014nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course\u2014but try to make a Tr'en see it!\n \n  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own\u2014and that means no translation.\n \n  But\u2014damn it\u2014I wish I were home already.\n \n  I'm bored absolutely stiff!\n \n\n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of translation in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 24742, "query_start_index": 24744, "query_end_index": 24807, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "Translation is at the core of the story because Korvin has to rely on the logical nature of the Tr'en language to try to throw the Tr'en people off. Because of the lived experiences of the Tr'en people, with their specific government style, and their literal approach to communication, Korvin is able to give them enough information about why he is there to be telling the truth without giving away his true motives. He hopes that this will spur them to try democracy in an attempt to understand the nature of the government on Earth, which will break their current habits and hopefully slow down their technological progress. It is the way that the groups of people must translate as they communicate that allows Korvin to confuse the masters of logic in the end. "}
{"id": "30029_3", "pid": "30029_3_2", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nLOST IN TRANSLATION\n \n\n By\n \n\n LARRY M. HARRIS\n \n In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en\u2014and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.\n \n An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.\n \n Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.\n \n He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.\n \n In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.\n \n True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.\n \n He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.\n \n But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.\n \n As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.\n \n The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.\n \n He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid\u2014that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.\n \n The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. \"You are Korvin,\" he said.\n \n It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. \"You are of the Tr'en,\" he replied. The green being nodded.\n \n \"I am Didyak of the Tr'en,\" he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly\u2014but no more than slightly\u2014and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.\n \n \"What do you want with me?\" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech\u2014apparently there was only one language on the planet\u2014was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.\n \n \"I want nothing with you,\" Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. \"You have other questions?\"\n \n Korvin sighed. \"What are you doing here, then?\" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.\n \n \"I am leaning against the door,\" Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.\n \n \"Why did you come to me?\" he said at last.\n \n Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. \"I have been ordered to come to you,\" Didyak said, \"by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you.\"\n \n It wasn't quite \"talk\"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: \"gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means.\" Korvin filed it away for future reference. \"Why did the Ruler not come to me?\" Korvin asked.\n \n \"The Ruler is the Ruler,\" Didyak said, slightly discomfited. \"You are to go to him. Such is his command.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. \"I obey the command of the Ruler,\" he said\u2014another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.\n \n But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en\u2014and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.\n \n That, after all, was his job.\n \n \n \n The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings\u2014a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair\u2014were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.\n \n The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.\n \n Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.\n \n The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex\u2014if any\u2014and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.\n \n Korvin was answering the last question. \"Some men are larger than I am,\" he said, \"and some are smaller.\"\n \n \"Within what limits?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Some are over eight feet tall,\" he said, \"and others under four feet.\" He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. \"Then there is a group of humans,\" he went on, \"who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that\u2014approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ,\" he volunteered helpfully.\n \n \"Approximately?\" the Ruler growled. \"We ask for precision here,\" he said. \"We are scientific men. We are exact.\"\n \n Korvin nodded hurriedly. \"Our race is more ... more approximate,\" he said apologetically.\n \n \"Slipshod,\" the Ruler muttered.\n \n \"Undoubtedly,\" Korvin agreed politely. \"I'll try to do the best I can for you.\"\n \n \"You will answer my questions,\" the Ruler said, \"with exactitude.\" He paused, frowning slightly. \"You landed your ship on this planet,\" he went on. \"Why?\"\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"A clumsy lie,\" the Ruler said. \"The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And it is your job to crash your ship?\" the Ruler said. \"Wasteful.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged again. \"What I say is true,\" he announced. \"Do you have tests for such matters?\"\n \n \"We do,\" the Ruler told him. \"We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you.\"\n \n Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector\u2014and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnop\u00e6dic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.\n \n Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.\n \n He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job\u2014not to mention the strongest personal inclinations\u2014demanded most strongly that he stay alive.\n \n He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.\n \n \"We shall test the machine,\" the Ruler said. \"In what room are you?\"\n \n \"In the Room of the Ruler,\" Korvin said equably.\n \n \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am sitting,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Are you a chulad ?\" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.\n \n \"I am not,\" he said.\n \n \n \n The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. \"You will tell an untruth now,\" he said. \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am standing,\" Korvin said.\n \n The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. \"The machine,\" he announced, \"has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue.\"\n \n Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.\n \n He hoped they were right.\n \n The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive.\n\"Why did you land your ship on this planet?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler nodded. \"Your job is to crash your ship,\" he said. \"It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?\"\n \n Korvin looked sober. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler blinked. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Was your job ended when the ship crashed?\" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant\n\"disposed of for all time.\"\n \n \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"What else does your job entail?\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. \"Staying alive.\"\n \n The Ruler roared. \"Do not waste time with the obvious!\" he shouted.\n\"Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly.\"\n \n \"I have told the truth,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But it is not\u2014not the truth we want,\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"I replied to your question,\" he said. \"I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?\"\n \n \"I\u2014\" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. \"You try to confuse the Ruler,\" he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. \"But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic\"\u2014the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying \u2014\"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called.\"\n \n Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.\n \n The Ruler looked down at Korvin. \"You will find that you cannot trick us,\" he said. \"You will find that such fiddling\"\u2014 chulad-like Korvin translated\u2014\"attempts will get you nowhere.\"\n \n Korvin devoutly hoped so.\n \n \n \n The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. \"They can be treated mathematically,\" one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. \"Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means.\"\n \n \"Good,\" Korvin said.\n \n The experts blinked. \"Good?\" he said.\n \n \"Naturally,\" Korvin said in a friendly tone.\n \n The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. \"Your plan is a failure,\" the expert said, \"and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. \"What is your plan?\" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.\n \n \"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically,\" Korvin said.\n \n The silence this time was even longer.\n \n \"The machine says that you tell the truth,\" the experts said at last, in a awed tone. \"Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us.\"\n \n Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.\n \n But it happened to be wrong.\n \n \n \n \"The name of your planet is Earth?\" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.\n \n \"Sometimes,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"It has other names?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It has no name,\" Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.\n \n \"Yet you call it Earth?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I do,\" Korvin said, \"for convenience.\"\n \n \"Do you know its location?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"Not with exactitude,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a stir. \"But you can find it again,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I can,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And you will tell us about it?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will,\" Korvin said, \"so far as I am able.\"\n \n \"We will wish to know about weapons,\" the Ruler said, \"and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?\"\n \n Korvin nearly smiled. \"Both,\" he said.\n \n A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. \"We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?\"\n \n Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. \"It is,\" he said.\n \n \"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It is,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Who is it that governs?\" the Ruler said.\n \n The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.\n \n \"The answer to that question,\" Korvin said, \"cannot be given to you.\"\n \n \"Any question of fact has an answer,\" the Ruler snapped. \"A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?\"\n \n \"Certainly,\" Korvin said. \"It is completely obvious and true.\"\n \n \"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said,\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then there is a governor for this system,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said again.\n \n The ruler sighed gently. \"Explain this governor to us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"The explanation cannot be given to you.\"\n \n The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. \"Is the deficiency in you?\" he said. \"Are you in some way unable to describe this government?\"\n \n \"It can be described,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will not,\" Korvin said.\n \n It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.\n \n The plan was taking hold.\n \n The Ruler had finished his conference. \"You are attempting again to confuse us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shook his head earnestly. \"I am attempting,\" he said, \"not to confuse you.\"\n \n \"Then I ask for an answer,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I request that I be allowed to ask a question,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. \"Ask it,\" he said. \"We shall answer it if we see fit to do so.\"\n \n Korvin tried to look grateful. \"Well, then,\" he said, \"what is your government?\"\n \n The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. \"Our government is the only logical form of government,\" he said in a high, sweet tenor. \"The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment.\"\n \n \"You have heard our government defined,\" the Ruler said. \"Now, you will define yours for us.\"\n \n Korvin shook his head. \"If you insist,\" he said, \"I'll try it. But you won't understand it.\"\n \n The Ruler frowned. \"We shall understand,\" he said. \"Begin. Who governs you?\"\n \n \"None,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But you are governed?\"\n \n Korvin nodded. \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then there is a governor,\" the Ruler insisted.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said. \"But everyone is the governor.\"\n \n \"Then there is no government,\" the Ruler said. \"There is no single decision.\"\n \n \"No,\" Korvin said equably, \"there are many decisions binding on all.\"\n \n \"Who makes them binding?\" the Ruler asked. \"Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?\"\n \n \"Many of them are unfavorable,\" Korvin said. \"But we are not forced to accept them.\"\n \n \"Do you act against your own interests?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Not knowingly,\" he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. \"I told you you wouldn't understand it,\" he said.\n \n \"It is a defect in your explanation,\" the Ruler almost snarled.\n \n \"My explanation is as exact as it can be,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler breathed gustily. \"Let us try something else,\" he said.\n\"Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples\u2014\"\n \n \"Neither have we,\" Korvin said. \"We are all individuals, like yourselves.\"\n \n \"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions\u2014\"\n \n \"We have no need of one,\" Korvin said calmly.\n \n \"Ah,\" the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. \"And why not?\"\n \n \"We call our form of government democracy ,\" Korvin said. \"It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler.\"\n \n One of the experts piped up suddenly. \"The beings themselves rule each other?\" he said. \"This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule.\"\n \n \"That is our form of government,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"You are lying,\" the expert said.\n \n One of the technicians chimed in: \"The machine tells us\u2014\"\n \n \"Then the machine is faulty,\" the expert said. \"It will be corrected.\"\n \n Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.\n \n It took three days\u2014but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.\n \n Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.\n \n On the third day Korvin escaped.\n \n It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.\n \n Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.\n \n Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.\n \n But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.\n \n The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby\u2014all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.\n \n He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.\n  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought\u2014nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course\u2014but try to make a Tr'en see it!\n \n  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own\u2014and that means no translation.\n \n  But\u2014damn it\u2014I wish I were home already.\n \n  I'm bored absolutely stiff!\n \n\n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of translation in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 24742, "query_start_index": 24744, "query_end_index": 24807, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "The Tr'en language has words that have more exact meanings than words in the English language. As a result, the true intent of the speaker is better conveyed. Korvin learns the Tr'en language while he is their captive, and he picks up on the nuance so well that he can understand the exact meaning and intent of the Tr'en when they speak to them, and thus use this to his advantage. Korvin can mask his own intent since his own language, the language of Earth, is less literal and capable of more complexity."}
{"id": "30029_3", "pid": "30029_3_3", "input": "You are given a story and a question. Answer the question in a paragraph.\n\nStory:\nLOST IN TRANSLATION\n \n\n By\n \n\n LARRY M. HARRIS\n \n In language translation, you may get a literally accurate word-for-word translation ... but miss the meaning entirely. And in space-type translation ... the effect may be the same!\n \n\n Illustrated by Schoenherr\n \n\n \n The cell had been put together more efficiently than any Korvin had ever been in. But that was only natural, he told himself sadly; the Tr'en were an efficient people. All the preliminary reports had agreed on that; their efficiency, as a matter of fact, was what had made Korvin's arrival a necessity. They were well into the atomic era, and were on the verge of developing space travel. Before long they'd be settling the other planets of their system, and then the nearer stars. Faster-than-light travel couldn't be far away, for the magnificently efficient physical scientists of the Tr'en\u2014and that would mean, in the ordinary course of events, an invitation to join the Comity of Planets.\n \n An invitation, the Comity was sure, which the Tr'en would not accept.\n \n Korvin stretched out on the cell's single bunk, a rigid affair which was hardly meant for comfort, and sighed. He'd had three days of isolation, with nothing to do but explore the resources of his own mind. He'd tried some of the ancient Rhine experiments, but that was no good; he still didn't show any particular psi talents. He couldn't unlock the cell door with his unaided mind; he couldn't even alter the probability of a single dust-mote's Brownian path through the somewhat smelly air. Nor could he disappear from his cell and appear, as if by magic, several miles away near the slightly-damaged hulk of his ship, to the wonder and amazement of his Tr'en captors.\n \n He could do, as a matter of fact, precisely nothing. He wished quietly that the Tr'en had seen fit to give him a pack of cards, or a book, or even a folder of tourist pictures. The Wonders of Tr'en, according to all the advance reports, were likely to be pretty boring, but they'd have been better than nothing.\n \n In any decently-run jail, he told himself with indignation, there would at least have been other prisoners to talk to. But on Tr'en Korvin was all alone.\n \n True, every night the guards came in and gave him a concentrated lesson in the local language, but Korvin failed to get much pleasure out of that, being unconscious at the time. But now he was equipped to discuss almost anything from philosophy to plumbing, but there was nobody to discuss it with. He changed position on the bunk and stared at the walls. The Tr'en were efficient; there weren't even any imperfections in the smooth surface to distract him.\n \n He wasn't tired and he wasn't hungry; his captors had left him with a full stock of food concentrates.\n \n But he was almightily bored, and about ready to tell anything to anyone, just for the chance at a little conversation.\n \n As he reached this dismal conclusion, the cell door opened. Korvin got up off the bunk in a hurry and spun around to face his visitor.\n \n The Tr'en was tall, and slightly green.\n \n He looked, as all the Tr'en did, vaguely humanoid\u2014that is, if you don't bother to examine him closely. Life in the universe appeared to be rigidly limited to humanoid types on oxygen planets; Korvin didn't know why, and neither did anybody else. There were a lot of theories, but none that accounted for all the facts satisfactorily. Korvin really didn't care about it; it was none of his business.\n \n The Tr'en regarded him narrowly through catlike pupils. \"You are Korvin,\" he said.\n \n It was a ritual, Korvin had learned. \"You are of the Tr'en,\" he replied. The green being nodded.\n \n \"I am Didyak of the Tr'en,\" he said. Amenities over with, he relaxed slightly\u2014but no more than slightly\u2014and came into the cell, closing the door behind him. Korvin thought of jumping the Tr'en, but decided quickly against it. He was a captive, and it was unwise to assume that his captors had no more resources than the ones he saw: a small translucent pistollike affair in a holster at the Tr'en's side, and a small knife in a sheath at the belt. Those Korvin could deal with; but there might be almost anything else hidden and ready to fire on him.\n \n \"What do you want with me?\" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech\u2014apparently there was only one language on the planet\u2014was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully constructed than even those marvels.\n \n \"I want nothing with you,\" Didyak said, leaning against the door-frame. \"You have other questions?\"\n \n Korvin sighed. \"What are you doing here, then?\" he asked. As conversation, it wasn't very choice; but it was, he admitted, better than solitude.\n \n \"I am leaning against the door,\" Didyak said. The Tr'en literalist approach to the smallest problems of everyday living was a little hard to get the hang of, Korvin told himself bitterly. He thought for a second.\n \n \"Why did you come to me?\" he said at last.\n \n Didyak beamed at him. The sight was remarkably unpleasant, involving as it did the disclosure of the Tr'en fifty-eight teeth, mostly pointed. Korvin stared back impassively. \"I have been ordered to come to you,\" Didyak said, \"by the Ruler. The Ruler wishes to talk with you.\"\n \n It wasn't quite \"talk\"; that was a general word in the Tr'en language, and Didyak had used a specific meaning, roughly: \"gain information from, by peaceful and vocal means.\" Korvin filed it away for future reference. \"Why did the Ruler not come to me?\" Korvin asked.\n \n \"The Ruler is the Ruler,\" Didyak said, slightly discomfited. \"You are to go to him. Such is his command.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged, sighed and smoothed back his hair. \"I obey the command of the Ruler,\" he said\u2014another ritual. Everybody obeyed the command of the Ruler. If you didn't, you never had a second chance to try.\n \n But Korvin meant exactly what he'd said. He was going to obey the commands of the Ruler of the Tr'en\u2014and remove the Tr'en threat from the rest of the galaxy forever.\n \n That, after all, was his job.\n \n \n \n The Room of the Ruler was large, square and excessively brown. The walls were dark-brown, the furnishings\u2014a single great chair, several kneeling-benches and a small table near the chair\u2014were light-brown, of some metallic substance, and even the drapes were tan. It was, Korvin decided, much too much of a bad idea, even when the color contrast of the Tr'en themselves were figured in.\n \n The Ruler himself, a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half feet high.\n \n Korvin wasn't attempting to escape. He wasn't pleading with the Ruler. He wasn't defying the Ruler, either. He was just answering questions.\n \n The Tr'en liked to have everything clear. They were a logical race. The Ruler had started with Korvin's race, his name, his sex\u2014if any\u2014and whether or not his appearance were normal for humanity.\n \n Korvin was answering the last question. \"Some men are larger than I am,\" he said, \"and some are smaller.\"\n \n \"Within what limits?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Some are over eight feet tall,\" he said, \"and others under four feet.\" He used the Tr'en measurement scale, of course; it didn't seem necessary, though, to mention that both extremes of height were at the circus-freak level. \"Then there is a group of humans,\" he went on, \"who are never more than a foot and a half in height, and usually less than that\u2014approximately nine or ten inches. We call these children ,\" he volunteered helpfully.\n \n \"Approximately?\" the Ruler growled. \"We ask for precision here,\" he said. \"We are scientific men. We are exact.\"\n \n Korvin nodded hurriedly. \"Our race is more ... more approximate,\" he said apologetically.\n \n \"Slipshod,\" the Ruler muttered.\n \n \"Undoubtedly,\" Korvin agreed politely. \"I'll try to do the best I can for you.\"\n \n \"You will answer my questions,\" the Ruler said, \"with exactitude.\" He paused, frowning slightly. \"You landed your ship on this planet,\" he went on. \"Why?\"\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"A clumsy lie,\" the Ruler said. \"The ship crashed; our examinations prove that beyond any doubt.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And it is your job to crash your ship?\" the Ruler said. \"Wasteful.\"\n \n Korvin shrugged again. \"What I say is true,\" he announced. \"Do you have tests for such matters?\"\n \n \"We do,\" the Ruler told him. \"We are an exact and a scientific race. A machine for the testing of truth has been adjusted to your physiology. It will be attached to you.\"\n \n Korvin looked around and saw it coming through the door, pushed by two technicians. It was large and squat and metallic, and it had wheels, dials, blinking lights, tubes and wires, and a seat with armrests and straps. It was obviously a form of lie-detector\u2014and Korvin felt himself marveling again at this race. Earth science had nothing to match their enormous command of the physical universe; adapting a hypnop\u00e6dic language-course to an alien being so quickly had been wonder enough, but adapting the perilously delicate mechanisms that necessarily made up any lie-detector machinery was almost a miracle. The Tr'en, under other circumstances, would have been a valuable addition to the Comity of Nations.\n \n Being what they were, though, they could only be a menace. And Korvin's appreciation of the size of that menace was growing hourly.\n \n He hoped the lie-detector had been adjusted correctly. If it showed him telling an untruth, he wasn't likely to live long, and his job\u2014not to mention the strongest personal inclinations\u2014demanded most strongly that he stay alive.\n \n He swallowed hard. But when the technicians forced him down into the seat, buckled straps around him, attached wires and electrodes and elastic bands to him at appropriate places and tightened some final screws, he made no resistance.\n \n \"We shall test the machine,\" the Ruler said. \"In what room are you?\"\n \n \"In the Room of the Ruler,\" Korvin said equably.\n \n \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am sitting,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Are you a chulad ?\" the Ruler asked. A chulad was a small native pet, Korvin knew, something like a greatly magnified deathwatch beetle.\n \n \"I am not,\" he said.\n \n \n \n The Ruler looked to his technicians for a signal, and nodded on receiving it. \"You will tell an untruth now,\" he said. \"Are you standing or sitting?\"\n \n \"I am standing,\" Korvin said.\n \n The technicians gave another signal. The Ruler looked, in his frowning manner, reasonably satisfied. \"The machine,\" he announced, \"has been adjusted satisfactorily to your physiology. The questioning will now continue.\"\n \n Korvin swallowed again. The test hadn't really seemed extensive enough to him. But, after all, the Tr'en knew their business, better than anyone else could know it. They had the technique and the logic and the training.\n \n He hoped they were right.\n \n The Ruler was frowning at him. Korvin did his best to look receptive.\n\"Why did you land your ship on this planet?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"My job required it,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler nodded. \"Your job is to crash your ship,\" he said. \"It is wasteful but the machines tell me it is true. Very well, then; we shall find out more about your job. Was the crash intentional?\"\n \n Korvin looked sober. \"Yes,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler blinked. \"Very well,\" he said. \"Was your job ended when the ship crashed?\" The Tr'en word, of course, wasn't ended , nor did it mean exactly that. As nearly as Korvin could make out, it meant\n\"disposed of for all time.\"\n \n \"No,\" he said.\n \n \"What else does your job entail?\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin decided to throw his first spoke into the wheel. \"Staying alive.\"\n \n The Ruler roared. \"Do not waste time with the obvious!\" he shouted.\n\"Do not try to trick us; we are a logical and scientific race! Answer correctly.\"\n \n \"I have told the truth,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But it is not\u2014not the truth we want,\" the Ruler said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"I replied to your question,\" he said. \"I did not know that there was more than one kind of truth. Surely the truth is the truth, just as the Ruler is the Ruler?\"\n \n \"I\u2014\" The Ruler stopped himself in mid-roar. \"You try to confuse the Ruler,\" he said at last, in an approximation of his usual one. \"But the Ruler will not be confused. We have experts in matters of logic\"\u2014the Tr'en word seemed to mean right-saying \u2014\"who will advise the Ruler. They will be called.\"\n \n Korvin's guards were standing around doing nothing of importance now that their captor was strapped down in the lie-detector. The Ruler gestured and they went out the door in a hurry.\n \n The Ruler looked down at Korvin. \"You will find that you cannot trick us,\" he said. \"You will find that such fiddling\"\u2014 chulad-like Korvin translated\u2014\"attempts will get you nowhere.\"\n \n Korvin devoutly hoped so.\n \n \n \n The experts in logic arrived shortly, and in no uncertain terms Korvin was given to understand that logical paradox was not going to confuse anybody on the planet. The barber who did, or didn't, shave himself, the secretary of the club whose members were secretaries, Achilles and the tortoise, and all the other lovely paradox-models scattered around were so much primer material for the Tr'en. \"They can be treated mathematically,\" one of the experts, a small emerald-green being, told Korvin thinly. \"Of course, you would not understand the mathematics. But that is not important. You need only understand that we cannot be confused by such means.\"\n \n \"Good,\" Korvin said.\n \n The experts blinked. \"Good?\" he said.\n \n \"Naturally,\" Korvin said in a friendly tone.\n \n The expert frowned horribly, showing all of his teeth. Korvin did his best not to react. \"Your plan is a failure,\" the expert said, \"and you call this a good thing. You can mean only that your plan is different from the one we are occupied with.\"\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a short silence. The expert beamed. He examined the indicators of the lie-detector with great care. \"What is your plan?\" he said at last, in a conspiratorial whisper.\n \n \"To answer your questions, truthfully and logically,\" Korvin said.\n \n The silence this time was even longer.\n \n \"The machine says that you tell the truth,\" the experts said at last, in a awed tone. \"Thus, you must be a traitor to your native planet. You must want us to conquer your planet, and have come here secretly to aid us.\"\n \n Korvin was very glad that wasn't a question. It was, after all, the only logical deduction.\n \n But it happened to be wrong.\n \n \n \n \"The name of your planet is Earth?\" the Ruler asked. A few minutes had passed; the experts were clustered around the single chair. Korvin was still strapped to the machine; a logical race makes use of a traitor, but a logical race does not trust him.\n \n \"Sometimes,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"It has other names?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It has no name,\" Korvin said truthfully. The Tr'en idiom was like the Earthly one; and certainly a planet had no name. People attached names to it, that was all. It had none of its own.\n \n \"Yet you call it Earth?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I do,\" Korvin said, \"for convenience.\"\n \n \"Do you know its location?\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"Not with exactitude,\" Korvin said.\n \n There was a stir. \"But you can find it again,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I can,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"And you will tell us about it?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will,\" Korvin said, \"so far as I am able.\"\n \n \"We will wish to know about weapons,\" the Ruler said, \"and about plans and fortifications. But we must first know of the manner of decision on this planet. Is your planet joined with others in a government or does it exist alone?\"\n \n Korvin nearly smiled. \"Both,\" he said.\n \n A short silence was broken by one of the attendant experts. \"We have theorized that an underling may be permitted to make some of his own decisions, leaving only the more extensive ones for the master. This seems to us inefficient and liable to error, yet it is a possible system. Is it the system you mean?\"\n \n Very sharp, Korvin told himself grimly. \"It is,\" he said.\n \n \"Then the government which reigns over several planets is supreme,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"It is,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Who is it that governs?\" the Ruler said.\n \n The key question had, at last, been asked. Korvin felt grateful that the logical Tr'en had determined to begin from the beginning, instead of going off after details of armament first; it saved a lot of time.\n \n \"The answer to that question,\" Korvin said, \"cannot be given to you.\"\n \n \"Any question of fact has an answer,\" the Ruler snapped. \"A paradox is not involved here; a government exists, and some being is the governor. Perhaps several beings share this task; perhaps machines do the work. But where there is a government, there is a governor. Is this agreed?\"\n \n \"Certainly,\" Korvin said. \"It is completely obvious and true.\"\n \n \"The planet from which you come is part of a system of planets which are governed, you have said,\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then there is a governor for this system,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said again.\n \n The ruler sighed gently. \"Explain this governor to us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"The explanation cannot be given to you.\"\n \n The Ruler turned to a group of his experts and a short muttered conversation took place. At its end the Ruler turned his gaze back to Korvin. \"Is the deficiency in you?\" he said. \"Are you in some way unable to describe this government?\"\n \n \"It can be described,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"Then you will suffer unpleasant consequences if you describe it to us?\" the Ruler went on.\n \n \"I will not,\" Korvin said.\n \n It was the signal for another conference. With some satisfaction, Korvin noticed that the Tr'en were becoming slightly puzzled; they were no longer moving and speaking with calm assurance.\n \n The plan was taking hold.\n \n The Ruler had finished his conference. \"You are attempting again to confuse us,\" he said.\n \n Korvin shook his head earnestly. \"I am attempting,\" he said, \"not to confuse you.\"\n \n \"Then I ask for an answer,\" the Ruler said.\n \n \"I request that I be allowed to ask a question,\" Korvin said.\n \n The Ruler hesitated, then nodded. \"Ask it,\" he said. \"We shall answer it if we see fit to do so.\"\n \n Korvin tried to look grateful. \"Well, then,\" he said, \"what is your government?\"\n \n The Ruler beckoned to a heavy-set green being, who stepped forward from a knot of Tr'en, inclined his head in Korvin's direction, and began. \"Our government is the only logical form of government,\" he said in a high, sweet tenor. \"The Ruler orders all, and his subjects obey. In this way uniformity is gained, and this uniformity aids in the speed of possible action and in the weight of action. All Tr'en act instantly in the same manner. The Ruler is adopted by the previous Ruler; in this way we are assured of a common wisdom and a steady judgment.\"\n \n \"You have heard our government defined,\" the Ruler said. \"Now, you will define yours for us.\"\n \n Korvin shook his head. \"If you insist,\" he said, \"I'll try it. But you won't understand it.\"\n \n The Ruler frowned. \"We shall understand,\" he said. \"Begin. Who governs you?\"\n \n \"None,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"But you are governed?\"\n \n Korvin nodded. \"Yes.\"\n \n \"Then there is a governor,\" the Ruler insisted.\n \n \"True,\" Korvin said. \"But everyone is the governor.\"\n \n \"Then there is no government,\" the Ruler said. \"There is no single decision.\"\n \n \"No,\" Korvin said equably, \"there are many decisions binding on all.\"\n \n \"Who makes them binding?\" the Ruler asked. \"Who forces you to accept these decisions? Some of them must be unfavorable to some beings?\"\n \n \"Many of them are unfavorable,\" Korvin said. \"But we are not forced to accept them.\"\n \n \"Do you act against your own interests?\"\n \n Korvin shrugged. \"Not knowingly,\" he said. The Ruler flashed a look at the technicians handling the lie-detector. Korvin turned to see their expression. They needed no words; the lie-detector was telling them, perfectly obviously, that he was speaking the truth. But the truth wasn't making any sense. \"I told you you wouldn't understand it,\" he said.\n \n \"It is a defect in your explanation,\" the Ruler almost snarled.\n \n \"My explanation is as exact as it can be,\" he said.\n \n The Ruler breathed gustily. \"Let us try something else,\" he said.\n\"Everyone is the governor. Do you share a single mind? A racial mind has been theorized, though we have met with no examples\u2014\"\n \n \"Neither have we,\" Korvin said. \"We are all individuals, like yourselves.\"\n \n \"But with no single ruler to form policy, to make decisions\u2014\"\n \n \"We have no need of one,\" Korvin said calmly.\n \n \"Ah,\" the Ruler said suddenly, as if he saw daylight ahead. \"And why not?\"\n \n \"We call our form of government democracy ,\" Korvin said. \"It means the rule of the people. There is no need for another ruler.\"\n \n One of the experts piped up suddenly. \"The beings themselves rule each other?\" he said. \"This is clearly impossible; for, no one being can have the force to compel acceptance of his commands. Without his force, there can be no effective rule.\"\n \n \"That is our form of government,\" Korvin said.\n \n \"You are lying,\" the expert said.\n \n One of the technicians chimed in: \"The machine tells us\u2014\"\n \n \"Then the machine is faulty,\" the expert said. \"It will be corrected.\"\n \n Korvin wondered, as the technicians argued, how long they'd take studying the machine, before they realized it didn't have any defects to correct. He hoped it wasn't going to be too long; he could foresee another stretch of boredom coming. And, besides, he was getting homesick.\n \n It took three days\u2014but boredom never really had a chance to set in. Korvin found himself the object of more attention than he had hoped for; one by one, the experts came to his cell, each with a different method of resolving the obvious contradictions in his statements.\n \n Some of them went away fuming. Others simply went away, puzzled.\n \n On the third day Korvin escaped.\n \n It wasn't very difficult; he hadn't thought it would be. Even the most logical of thinking beings has a subconscious as well as a conscious mind, and one of the ways of dealing with an insoluble problem is to make the problem disappear. There were only two ways of doing that, and killing the problem's main focus was a little more complicated. That couldn't be done by the subconscious mind; the conscious had to intervene somewhere. And it couldn't.\n \n Because that would mean recognizing, fully and consciously, that the problem was insoluble. And the Tr'en weren't capable of that sort of thinking.\n \n Korvin thanked his lucky stars that their genius had been restricted to the physical and mathematical. Any insight at all into the mental sciences would have given them the key to his existence, and his entire plan, within seconds.\n \n But, then, it was lack of that insight that had called for this particular plan. That, and the political structure of the Tr'en.\n \n The same lack of insight let the Tr'en subconscious work on his escape without any annoying distractions in the way of deep reflection. Someone left a door unlocked and a weapon nearby\u2014all quite intent, Korvin was sure. Getting to the ship was a little more complicated, but presented no new problems; he was airborne, and then space-borne, inside of a few hours after leaving the cell.\n \n He set his course, relaxed, and cleared his mind. He had no psionic talents, but the men at Earth Central did; he couldn't receive messages, but he could send them. He sent one now.\n  Mission accomplished; the Tr'en aren't about to come marauding out into space too soon. They've been given food for thought\u2014nice indigestible food that's going to stick in their craws until they finally manage to digest it. But they can't digest it and stay what they are; you've got to be democratic, to some extent, to understand the idea. What keeps us obeying laws we ourselves make? What keeps us obeying laws that make things inconvenient for us? Sheer self-interest, of course\u2014but try to make a Tr'en see it!\n \n  With one government and one language, they just weren't equipped for translation. They were too efficient physically to try for the mental sciences at all. No mental sciences, no insight into my mind or their own\u2014and that means no translation.\n \n  But\u2014damn it\u2014I wish I were home already.\n \n  I'm bored absolutely stiff!\n \n\n THE END\n\nQuestion:\nWhat is the significance of translation in the story?\n\nAnswer:\n", "document_start_index": 82, "document_end_index": 24742, "query_start_index": 24744, "query_end_index": 24807, "truncation_seperator": "... [The rest of the story is omitted]\n\n", "output": "   The Tr\u2019en society is based on straightforward communication and literal interpretation of every spoken word. This is presumably why they teach Korvin their language, enabling him to communicate with them directly without an interpreter. However, the Tr\u2019ens\u2019 exclusive focus on math and the physical sciences creates a significant weakness that Korvin exploits: they have no understanding of their own or others\u2019 mental capacity and nuances of language and, therefore, no ability to interpret anything they consider illogical. When Didyak uses the word \u201ctalk\u201d that means to \u201cgain information from, by peaceful and vocal means,\u201d Korvin realizes that he will be able to save himself and his mission by communicating with the Tr\u2019ens in a way that literally answers their questions without giving away his true mission of stopping the Tr\u2019en\u2019s advancement into the galaxy. \n     When the Ruler tries to find out Korvin\u2019s purpose for intentionally crashing his ship and if he has other intentions, Korvin\u2019s responses are forthright in a literal sense: yes, he crashed his ship on purpose, no his job isn\u2019t ended, now his job is to stay alive.       \n     Completely flummoxed, the Ruler calls in his experts in logic to question Korvin further, and based on his answers, they logically conclude that he is a traitor to Earth and is there to help the Tr\u2019ens overthrow Earth. Korvin also confuses the Tr\u2019ens with his explanation of Earth\u2019s democracy. Their frustration ends the hearing before the Ruler, but the experts continue to question Korvin in his cell. \n     It becomes clear to the experts that their lie-detecting machine is not faulty, but they cannot understand Korvin\u2019s explanations. So on the third day after being called to the Ruler, Korvin finds an unlocked door and a weapon, enabling him to escape and thus solving their insolvable problem. Korvin knows that the Tr\u2019en will be obsessed with trying to understand the democratic ideas that he described and that they will never be able to understand them without changing themselves. They are incapable of translating his responses in the context of their very literal society.\n"}
